On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 06:38:15PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 6:25 PM, Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > That's a different interface. > > So is openat. So is readahead. > > My point is that this idiotic "let's expose special cases" must end. > It's broken. It inevitably only exposes a subset of what different > people would want. > > Making "aio_read()" and friends a special interface had historical > reasons for it. But expanding willy-nilly on that model does not. Yes, I heard you the first time, but you haven't acknowledged that the aio fsync interface is indeed different because it already exists. What's the problem with implementing an AIO call that we've advertised as supported for many years now that people are asking us to implement it? As for a generic async syscall interface, why not just add IOCB_CMD_SYSCALL that encodes the syscall number and parameters into the iovec structure and let the existing aio subsystem handle demultiplexing it and handing them off to threads/workqueues/etc? That was we get contexts, events, signals, completions, cancelations, etc from the existing infrastructure, and there's really only a dispatch/collection layer that needs to be added? If we then provide the userspace interface via the libaio library to call the async syscalls with an AIO context handle, then there's little more that needs to be done to support just about everything as an async syscall... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html