Hi Martijn,

On 4/29/20 4:03 PM, Martijn Coenen wrote:

This allows userspace to completely setup a loop device with a single
ioctl, removing the in-between state where the device can be partially
configured - eg the loop device has a backing file associated with it,
but is reading from the wrong offset.

Besides removing the intermediate state, another big benefit of this
ioctl is that LOOP_SET_STATUS can be slow; the main reason for this
slowness is that LOOP_SET_STATUS(64) calls blk_mq_freeze_queue() to
freeze the associated queue; this requires waiting for RCU
synchronization, which I've measured can take about 15-20ms on this
device on average.

In addition to doing what LOOP_SET_STATUS can do, LOOP_CONFIGURE can
also be used to:
- Set the correct block size immediately by setting
  loop_config.block_size (avoids LOOP_SET_BLOCK_SIZE)
- Explicitly request direct I/O mode by setting LO_FLAGS_DIRECT_IO
  in loop_config.info.lo_flags (avoids LOOP_SET_DIRECT_IO)
- Explicitly request read-only mode by setting LO_FLAGS_READ_ONLY
  in loop_config.info.lo_flags

Here's setting up ~70 regular loop devices with an offset on an x86
Android device, using LOOP_SET_FD and LOOP_SET_STATUS:

vsoc_x86:/system/apex # time for i in `seq 30 100`;
do losetup -r -o 4096 /dev/block/loop$i com.android.adbd.apex; done
    0m03.40s real     0m00.02s user     0m00.03s system

Here's configuring ~70 devices in the same way, but using a modified
losetup that uses the new LOOP_CONFIGURE ioctl:

vsoc_x86:/system/apex # time for i in `seq 30 100`;
do losetup -r -o 4096 /dev/block/loop$i com.android.adbd.apex; done
    0m01.94s real     0m00.01s user     0m00.01s system

Signed-off-by: Martijn Coenen <redacted>

Can we have also a patch for the loop.4 manual page please?

Thanks,

Michael


-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/