Re: Bug in short splice to socket?

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] wrote:

So a "splice_eof()" sounds fine to me, and we'd make the semantics be
the current behavior:

 - splice() sets SPLICE_F_MORE if 'len > read_len'

 - splice() _clears_ SPLICE_F_MORE if we have hit 'len'

 - splice always sets SPLICE_F_MORE if it was passed by the user

BUT with the small new 'splice_eof()' rule that:

 - if the user did *not* set SPLICE_F_MORE *and* we didn't hit that
"use all of len" case that cleared SPLICE_F_MORE, *and* we did a
"->splice_in()" that returned EOF (ie zero), *then* we will also do
that ->splice_eof() call.

The above sounds like "stable and possibly useful semantics" to me. It
would just have to be documented.

Is that what people want?

That's easier to implement, I think.  That's basically what I was trying to
achieve by sending a zero-length actor call, but this is a cleaner way of
doing it, particularly if it's added as a socket op next to ->sendmsg().

Otherwise I have to build up the input side to try and tell me in advance
whether it thinks we hit an EOF/hole/whatever condition.  The problem is that,
as previously mentioned, it doesn't work for all circumstances - seqfile,
pipes, sockets for instance.

Take the following scenario for example: I could read from a TCP socket,
filling up the pipe-buffer, but not with sufficient data to fulfill the
operation.  Say I drain the TCP socket, but it's still open, so might produce
more data.  I then call the actor, which passes all the data to sendmsg() with
MSG_SPLICE_PAGES and MSG_MORE and clears the buffer.  I then go round again,
but in the meantime, the source socket got shut down with no further data
available and do_splice_to() returns 0.

There's no way to predict this, so having a ->splice_eof() call would handle
this situation.

David