With the poll retry based async IO patchset I posted last week, the one big missing thing for me was the ability to have automatic buffer selection. Generally applications that handle tons of sockets like to poll for activity on them, then issue IO when they become ready. This is of course at least two system calls, but it also means that it provides an application a chance to manage how many IO buffers it needs. With the io_uring based polled IO, the application need only issue an IORING_OP_RECV (for example, to receive socket data), it doesn't need to poll at all. However, this means that the application no longer has an opportune moment to select how many IO buffers to keep in flight, it has to be equal to what it currently has pending. I had originally intended to use BPF to provide some means of buffer selection, but I had a hard time imagining how life times of the buffer could be managed through that. I had a false start today, but Andres suggested a nifty approach that also solves the life time issue. Basically the application registers buffers with the kernel. Each buffer is registered with a given group ID, and buffer ID. The buffers are organized by group ID, and the application selects a buffer pool based on this group ID. One use case might be to group by size. There's an opcode for this, IORING_OP_PROVIDE_BUFFER. With that, when doing the same IORING_OP_RECV, no buffer is passed in with the request. Instead, it's flagged with IOSQE_BUFFER_SELECT, and sqe->buf_group is filled in with a valid group ID. When the kernel can satisfy the receive, a buffer is selected from the specified group ID pool. If none are available, the IO is terminated with -ENOBUFS. On success, the buffer ID is passed back through the (CQE) completion event. This tells the application what specific buffer was used. A buffer can be used only once. On completion, the application may choose to free it, or register it again with IORING_OP_PROVIDE_BUFFER. Patches can also be found in the below repo: https://git.kernel.dk/cgit/linux-block/log/?h=io_uring-buf-select and they are obviously layered on top of the poll retry rework. -- Jens Axboe
