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* [RFC] Heads up on a series of AIO patchsets
@ 2006-12-27 15:38 Suparna Bhattacharya
  2006-12-27 16:25 ` Christoph Hellwig
                   ` (5 more replies)
  0 siblings, 6 replies; 67+ messages in thread
From: Suparna Bhattacharya @ 2006-12-27 15:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: linux-aio, akpm, drepper; +Cc: linux-fsdevel, linux-kernel, jakub, mingo


Here is a quick attempt to summarize where we are heading with a bunch of
AIO patches that I'll be posting over the next few days. Because a few of
these patches have been hanging around for a bit, and have gone through
bursts of iterations from time to time, falling dormant for other phases,
the intent of this note is to help pull things together into some coherent
picture for folks to comment on the patches and arrive at a decision of
some sort.

Native linux aio (i.e using libaio) is properly supported (in the sense of
being asynchronous) only for files opened with O_DIRECT, which actually
suffices for a major (and most visible) user of AIO, i.e. databases.

However, for other types of users, e.g. Samba and other applications which
use POSIX AIO, there have been several issues outstanding for a while:

(1) The filesystem AIO patchset, attempts to address one part of the problem
    which is to make regular file IO, (without O_DIRECT) asynchronous (mainly
    the case of reads of uncached or partially cached files, and O_SYNC writes).

(2) Most of these other applications need the ability to process both
    network events (epoll) and disk file AIO in the same loop. With POSIX AIO
    they could at least sort of do this using signals (yeah, and all associated
    issues). The IO_CMD_EPOLL_WAIT patch (originally from Zach Brown with
    modifications from Jeff Moyer and me) addresses this problem for native
    linux aio in a simple manner. Tridge has written a test harness to 
    try out the Samba4 event library modifications to use this. Jeff Moyer
    has a modified version of pipetest for comparison.

(3) For glibc POSIX AIO to switch to using native AIO (instead of simulation
    with threads) kernel changes are needed to ensure aio sigevent notification
    and efficient listio support. Sebestian Dugue's patches for aio sigevent
    notifications has undergone several review iterations and seems to be
    in good shape now. His patch for lio_listio is pending discussion
    on whether to implement it as a separate syscall rather than an additional
    iocb command. Bharata B Rao has posted a patch with the syscall variation
    for review.

(4) If glibc POSIX AIO switches completely to using native AIO then it
    would need basic AIO support for various file types - including sockets,
    pipes etc. Since it no longer will be simulating asynchronous behaviour
    with threads, it expects the underlying implementation to be asynchronous.
    Which is still an issue with native linux AIO, but I now think the problem
    to be tractable without a lot of additional work. While (1) helps the case
    for regular files, (2) now provides us an alternative infrastructure to
    simulate this in kernel using async epoll and O_NONBLOCK for all pollable
    fds, i.e. sockets, pipes etc. This should be good enough for working
    POSIX AIO.

(5) That leaves just one more todo - implementing aio_fsync() in kernel.

Please note that all of this work is not in conflict with kevent development.
In fact it is my hope that progress made in getting these pieces of the
puzzle in place would also help us along the long term goal of eventual
convergence.

Regards
Suparna

-- 
Suparna Bhattacharya (suparna@in.ibm.com)
Linux Technology Center
IBM Software Lab, India


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 67+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2007-01-11  4:54 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 67+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2006-12-27 15:38 [RFC] Heads up on a series of AIO patchsets Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-27 16:25 ` Christoph Hellwig
2006-12-27 16:55   ` Ingo Molnar
2006-12-27 16:55     ` Ingo Molnar
2006-12-27 17:18     ` Ingo Molnar
2006-12-28 11:41   ` Evgeniy Polyakov
2006-12-28 11:41     ` Evgeniy Polyakov
2007-01-02 21:38     ` Dan Williams
2007-01-03 13:35       ` Evgeniy Polyakov
2006-12-28  8:23 ` [PATCHSET 1][PATCH 0/6] Filesystem AIO read/write Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:34   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 1/6] Add a wait queue parameter to the wait_bit action routine Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:46     ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:36   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 2/8] Rename __lock_page to lock_page_slow Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:39   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 3/8] Routines to initialize and test a wait bit key Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28 22:42     ` Andrew Morton
2006-12-28  8:39   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 4/8] Add a default io wait bit field in task struct Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:40   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 5/8] Enable wait bit based filtered wakeups to work for AIO Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:41   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 6/8] Enable asynchronous wait page and lock page Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28 11:55     ` Christoph Hellwig
2006-12-28 14:47       ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-02 14:26         ` Christoph Hellwig
2007-01-04  6:50           ` Nick Piggin
2006-12-28  8:42   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 7/8] Filesystem AIO read Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:42     ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28 11:57     ` Christoph Hellwig
2006-12-28 14:15       ` Christoph Hellwig
2006-12-28 15:18       ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-02 14:29         ` Christoph Hellwig
2006-12-28 16:22       ` Jan Engelhardt
2006-12-28 16:56         ` Randy Dunlap
2006-12-28 16:56           ` Randy Dunlap
2006-12-28  8:44   ` [FSAIO][PATCH 8/8] AIO O_SYNC filesystem write Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  8:44     ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2006-12-28  9:52   ` [PATCHSET 1][PATCH 0/6] Filesystem AIO read/write Ingo Molnar
2006-12-28 22:53   ` Andrew Morton
2007-01-03 22:15   ` Andrew Morton
2007-01-04  4:56     ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-04  4:56       ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-04  5:51       ` Nick Piggin
2007-01-04  6:26         ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-04  6:50           ` Nick Piggin
2007-01-04 11:24             ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-05  4:56               ` Nick Piggin
2007-01-04 17:02       ` Andrew Morton
2007-01-04 17:49         ` Jens Axboe
2007-01-05  6:28         ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-05  7:02           ` Jens Axboe
2007-01-05  8:08             ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-05  8:32               ` Jens Axboe
2007-01-10  5:44         ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-11  1:08           ` Andrew Morton
2007-01-11  3:13             ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-11  4:52               ` Andrew Morton
2007-01-02 23:56 ` [RFC] Heads up on a series of AIO patchsets Zach Brown
     [not found]   ` <6f703f960701021640y444bc537w549fd6d74f3e9529@mail.gmail.com>
     [not found]     ` <A85B8249-FC4E-4612-8B28-02BC680DC812@oracle.com>
2007-01-03  1:18       ` Kent Overstreet
2007-01-04 20:33         ` Pavel Machek
2007-01-03  5:03   ` Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-05  0:36     ` Zach Brown
2007-01-03  7:23 ` [PATCHSET 2][PATCH 1/1] Combining epoll and disk file AIO Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-04  9:27 ` [PATCHSET 3][PATCH 0/5][AIO] - AIO completion signal notification v4 Bharata B Rao
2007-01-04  9:30   ` [PATCHSET 3][PATCH 1/5][AIO] - Rework compat_sys_io_submit Bharata B Rao
2007-01-04  9:32   ` [PATCHSET 3][PATCH 2/5][AIO] - fix aio.h includes Bharata B Rao
2007-01-04  9:34   ` [PATCHSET 3][PATCH 3/5][AIO] - Make good_sigevent non-static Bharata B Rao
2007-01-04  9:38   ` [PATCHSET 3][PATCH 4/5][AIO] - AIO completion signal notification Bharata B Rao
2007-01-04  9:40   ` [PATCHSET 3][PATCH 5/5][AIO] - Add listio support Bharata B Rao
2007-01-05  5:32 ` [PATCHSET 4][PATCH 1/1] AIO fallback for pipes, sockets and pollable fds Suparna Bhattacharya
2007-01-05  5:32   ` Suparna Bhattacharya

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