Hi Pavel, Willy, Jens, Al, I had a go switching the iov_iter stuff away from using a type bitmask to using an ops table to get rid of the if-if-if-if chains that are all over the place. After I pushed it, someone pointed me at Pavel's two patches. I have another iterator class that I want to add - which would lengthen the if-if-if-if chains. A lot of the time, there's a conditional clause at the beginning of a function that just jumps off to a type-specific handler or to reject the operation for that type. An ops table can just point to that instead. As far as I can tell, there's no difference in performance in most cases, though doing AFS-based kernel compiles appears to take less time (down from 3m20 to 2m50), which might make sense as that uses iterators a lot - but there are too many variables in that for that to be a good benchmark (I'm dealing with a remote server, for a start). Can someone recommend a good way to benchmark this properly? The problem is that the difference this makes relative to the amount of time taken to actually do I/O is tiny. I've tried TCP transfers using the following sink program: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <fcntl.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <netinet/in.h> #define OSERROR(X, Y) do { if ((long)(X) == -1) { perror(Y); exit(1); } } while(0) static unsigned char buffer[512 * 1024] __attribute__((aligned(4096))); int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { struct sockaddr_in sin = { .sin_family = AF_INET, .sin_port = htons(5555) }; int sfd, afd; sfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); OSERROR(sfd, "socket"); OSERROR(bind(sfd, (struct sockaddr *)&sin, sizeof(sin)), "bind"); OSERROR(listen(sfd, 1), "listen"); for (;;) { afd = accept(sfd, NULL, NULL); if (afd != -1) { while (read(afd, buffer, sizeof(buffer)) > 0) {} close(afd); } } } and send program: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <fcntl.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <netdb.h> #include <netinet/in.h> #include <sys/stat.h> #include <sys/sendfile.h> #define OSERROR(X, Y) do { if ((long)(X) == -1) { perror(Y); exit(1); } } while(0) static unsigned char buffer[512*1024] __attribute__((aligned(4096))); int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { struct sockaddr_in sin = { .sin_family = AF_INET, .sin_port = htons(5555) }; struct hostent *h; ssize_t size, r, o; int cfd; if (argc != 3) { fprintf(stderr, "tcp-gen <server> <size>\n"); exit(2); } size = strtoul(argv[2], NULL, 0); if (size <= 0) { fprintf(stderr, "Bad size\n"); exit(2); } h = gethostbyname(argv[1]); if (!h) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s\n", argv[1], hstrerror(h_errno)); exit(3); } if (!h->h_addr_list[0]) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: No addresses\n", argv[1]); exit(3); } memcpy(&sin.sin_addr, h->h_addr_list[0], h->h_length); cfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); OSERROR(cfd, "socket"); OSERROR(connect(cfd, (struct sockaddr *)&sin, sizeof(sin)), "connect"); do { r = size > sizeof(buffer) ? sizeof(buffer) : size; size -= r; o = 0; do { ssize_t w = write(cfd, buffer + o, r - o); OSERROR(w, "write"); o += w; } while (o < r); } while (size > 0); OSERROR(close(cfd), "close/c"); return 0; } since the socket interface uses iterators. It seems to show no difference. One side note, though: I've been doing 10GiB same-machine transfers, and it takes either ~2.5s or ~0.87s and rarely in between, with or without these patches, alternating apparently randomly between the two times. The patches can be found here: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dhowells/linux-fs.git/log/?h=iov-ops David --- David Howells (29): iov_iter: Switch to using a table of operations iov_iter: Split copy_page_to_iter() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_fault_in_readable iov_iter: Split the iterate_and_advance() macro iov_iter: Split copy_to_iter() iov_iter: Split copy_mc_to_iter() iov_iter: Split copy_from_iter() iov_iter: Split the iterate_all_kinds() macro iov_iter: Split copy_from_iter_full() iov_iter: Split copy_from_iter_nocache() iov_iter: Split copy_from_iter_flushcache() iov_iter: Split copy_from_iter_full_nocache() iov_iter: Split copy_page_from_iter() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_zero() iov_iter: Split copy_from_user_atomic() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_advance() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_revert() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_single_seg_count() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_alignment() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_gap_alignment() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_get_pages() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_get_pages_alloc() iov_iter: Split csum_and_copy_from_iter() iov_iter: Split csum_and_copy_from_iter_full() iov_iter: Split csum_and_copy_to_iter() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_npages() iov_iter: Split dup_iter() iov_iter: Split iov_iter_for_each_range() iov_iter: Remove iterate_all_kinds() and iterate_and_advance() lib/iov_iter.c | 1440 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----------------- 1 file changed, 934 insertions(+), 506 deletions(-)