Re: selective block polling and preadv2/pwritev2 revisited V3

On Thursday 03 March 2016 16:11:16 Christoph Hellwig wrote:

This series allows to selectively enable/disable polling for completions
in the block layer on a per-I/O basis.  For this it resurrects the
preadv2/pwritev2 syscalls that Milosz prepared a while ago (and which
are much simpler now due to VFS changes that happened in the meantime).
That approach also had a man page update prepared, which I will resubmit
with the current flags once this series makes it in.

Polling for block I/O is important to reduce the latency on flash and
post-flash storage technologies.  On the fastest NVMe controller I have
access to it almost halves latencies from over 7 microseconds to about 4
microseonds.  But it only is usesful if we actually care for the latency
of this particular I/O, and generally is a waste if enabled for all I/O
to a given device.  This series uses the per-I/O flags in preadv2/pwritev2
to control this behavior.  The alternative would be a new O_* flag set
at open time or using fcntl, but this is still to corse-grained for some
applications and we're starting to run out out of open flags.

Note that there are plenty of other use cases for preadv2/pwritev2 as well,
but I'd like to concentrate on this one for now.  Example are: non-blocking
reads (the original purpose), per-I/O O_SYNC, user space support for T10
DIF/DIX applications tags and probably some more.

If we decide to revise the asm-generic/unistd.h system call list
for future architecture ports, can the syscalls replace all of
read/write/readv/writev/pread64/write64/preadv/pwritev, or would
it be better to keep all of them around indefinitely?

When we introduced the generic syscall table, I tried to limit
it to the syscalls that are actually needed and avoid all duplications,
but since then we have added a couple of calls that can replace old
ones, and we might want to do that when risc-v gets merged.

	Arnd