Re: [PATCH v5 02/10] block: Add copy offload support infrastructure

On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 11:28:19AM +0530, Nitesh Shetty wrote:

Introduce blkdev_issue_copy which supports source and destination bdevs,
and an array of (source, destination and copy length) tuples.
Introduce REQ_COPY copy offload operation flag. Create a read-write
bio pair with a token as payload and submitted to the device in order.
Read request populates token with source specific information which
is then passed with write request.
This design is courtesy Mikulas Patocka's token based copy

I thought this patchset is just for enabling copy command which is
supported by hardware. But turns out it isn't, because blk_copy_offload()
still submits read/write bios for doing the copy.

I am just wondering why not let copy_file_range() cover this kind of copy,
and the framework has been there.

When I was researching pipe/splice code for supporting ublk zero copy[1], I
have got idea for async copy_file_range(), such as: io uring based
direct splice, user backed intermediate buffer, still zero copy, if these
ideas are finally implemented, we could get super-fast generic offload copy,
and bdev copy is really covered too.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-block/20221103085004.1029763-1-ming.lei@redhat.com/ (local)

thanks,
Ming