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From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Ray Strode <rstrode@redhat.com>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>,
	Nicolas Dichtel <nicolas.dichtel@6wind.com>,
	raven@themaw.net, keyrings@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-usb@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-block <linux-block@vger.kernel.org>,
	Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>,
	LSM List <linux-security-module@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>,
	Linux List Kernel Mailing <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
	"Ray, Debarshi" <debarshi.ray@gmail.com>,
	Robbie Harwood <rharwood@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Why add the general notification queue and its sources
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2019 15:08:42 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wgbCXea1a9OTWgMMvcsCGGiNiPp+ty-edZrBWn63NCYdw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <5396.1567719164@warthog.procyon.org.uk>

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 2:32 PM David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>  (1) /dev/watch_queue just implements locked-in-memory buffers.  It gets you
>      no events by simply opening it.

Cool. In-memory buffers.

But I know - we *have* one of those. There's already a system call for
it, and has been forever. One that we then extended to allow people to
change the buffer size, and do a lot of other things with.

It's called "pipe()". And you can give the writing side to other user
space processes too, in case you are running an older kernel that
didn't have some "event pipe support". It comes with resource
management, because people already use those things.

If you want to make a message protocol on top of it, it has cool
atomicity guarantees for any message size less than PIPE_BUF, but to
make things simple, maybe just say "fixed record sizes of 64 bytes" or
something like that for events.

Then you can use them from things like perl scripts, not just magical
C programs.

Why do we need a new kind of super-fancy high-speed thing for event reporting?

If you have *so* many events that pipe handling is a performance
issue, you have something seriously wrong going on.

So no. I'm not interested in a magical memory-mapped pipe that is
actually more limited than the real thing.

                  Linus

  reply	other threads:[~2019-09-05 22:14 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 36+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-09-04 22:15 [PATCH 00/11] Keyrings, Block and USB notifications [ver #8] David Howells
2019-09-04 22:15 ` [PATCH 01/11] uapi: General notification ring definitions " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:16 ` [PATCH 02/11] security: Add hooks to rule on setting a watch " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:16 ` [PATCH 03/11] security: Add a hook for the point of notification insertion " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:16 ` [PATCH 04/11] General notification queue with user mmap()'able ring buffer " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:16 ` [PATCH 05/11] keys: Add a notification facility " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:16 ` [PATCH 06/11] Add a general, global device notification watch list " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:16 ` [PATCH 07/11] block: Add block layer notifications " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:16 ` [PATCH 08/11] usb: Add USB subsystem " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:17 ` [PATCH 09/11] Add sample notification program " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:17 ` [PATCH 10/11] selinux: Implement the watch_key security hook " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:17 ` [PATCH 11/11] smack: Implement the watch_key and post_notification hooks " David Howells
2019-09-04 22:28 ` [PATCH 00/11] Keyrings, Block and USB notifications " Linus Torvalds
2019-09-05 17:01 ` Why add the general notification queue and its sources David Howells
2019-09-05 17:19   ` Linus Torvalds
2019-09-05 18:32     ` Ray Strode
2019-09-05 20:39       ` Linus Torvalds
2019-09-06 19:32         ` Ray Strode
2019-09-06 19:41           ` Ray Strode
2019-09-06 19:53           ` Robbie Harwood
2019-09-05 21:32       ` David Howells
2019-09-05 22:08         ` Linus Torvalds [this message]
2019-09-05 23:18         ` David Howells
2019-09-06  0:07           ` Linus Torvalds
2019-09-06 10:09           ` David Howells
2019-09-06 15:35             ` Linus Torvalds
2019-09-06 15:53               ` Linus Torvalds
2019-09-06 16:12                 ` Steven Whitehouse
2019-09-06 17:07                   ` Linus Torvalds
2019-09-06 17:14                     ` Linus Torvalds
2019-09-06 21:19                       ` David Howells
2019-09-06 17:14                   ` Andy Lutomirski
2019-09-05 18:37     ` Steven Whitehouse
2019-09-05 18:51       ` Ray Strode
2019-09-05 20:09         ` David Lehman
2019-09-05 18:33   ` Greg Kroah-Hartman

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