On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 12:51 PM Chaitanya Kulkarni
[off-list ref] wrote:

Hi,

* Background :-
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Copy offload is a feature that allows file-systems or storage devices
to be instructed to copy files/logical blocks without requiring
involvement of the local CPU.

With reference to the RISC-V summit keynote [1] single threaded
performance is limiting due to Denard scaling and multi-threaded
performance is slowing down due Moore's law limitations. With the rise
of SNIA Computation Technical Storage Working Group (TWG) [2],
offloading computations to the device or over the fabrics is becoming
popular as there are several solutions available [2]. One of the common
operation which is popular in the kernel and is not merged yet is Copy
offload over the fabrics or on to the device.

* Problem :-
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The original work which is done by Martin is present here [3]. The
latest work which is posted by Mikulas [4] is not merged yet. These two
approaches are totally different from each other. Several storage
vendors discourage mixing copy offload requests with regular READ/WRITE
I/O. Also, the fact that the operation fails if a copy request ever
needs to be split as it traverses the stack it has the unfortunate
side-effect of preventing copy offload from working in pretty much
every common deployment configuration out there.

* Current state of the work :-
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With [3] being hard to handle arbitrary DM/MD stacking without
splitting the command in two, one for copying IN and one for copying
OUT. Which is then demonstrated by the [4] why [3] it is not a suitable
candidate. Also, with [4] there is an unresolved problem with the
two-command approach about how to handle changes to the DM layout
between an IN and OUT operations.

We have conducted a call with interested people late last year since
lack of LSFMMM and we would like to share the details with broader
community members.

I'm keen on this topic and would like to join the F2F discussion.
The Novmber call did establish some consensus on requirements.
Planning to have a round or two of code-discussions soon.


Thanks,
-- 
Kanchan