If userspace calls sendfile() with a very large "count" parameter, the
kernel can block for a very long time until 2 GiB (0x7ffff000 bytes)
have been read from the hard disk and pushed into the socket buffer.
Usually, that is not a problem, because the socket write buffer gets
filled quickly, and if the socket is non-blocking, the last
direct_splice_actor() call will return -EAGAIN, causing
splice_direct_to_actor() to break from the loop, and sendfile() will
return a partial transfer.
However, if the network happens to be faster than the hard disk, and
the socket buffer keeps getting drained between two
generic_file_read_iter() calls, the sendfile() system call can keep
running for a long time, blocking for disk I/O over and over.
That is undesirable, because it can block the calling process for too
long. I discovered a problem where nginx would block for so long that
it would drop the HTTP connection because the kernel had just
transferred 2 GiB in one call, and the HTTP socket was not writable
(EPOLLOUT) for more than 60 seconds, resulting in a timeout:
sendfile(4, 12, [5518919528] => [5884939344], 1813448856) = 366019816 <3.033067>
sendfile(4, 12, [5884939344], 1447429040) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable) <0.000037>
epoll_wait(9, [{EPOLLOUT, {u32=2181955104, u64=140572166585888}}], 512, 60000) = 1 <0.003355>
gettimeofday({tv_sec=1667508799, tv_usec=201201}, NULL) = 0 <0.000024>
sendfile(4, 12, [5884939344] => [8032418896], 2147480496) = 2147479552 <10.727970>
writev(4, [], 0) = 0 <0.000439>
epoll_wait(9, [], 512, 60000) = 0 <60.060430>
gettimeofday({tv_sec=1667508869, tv_usec=991046}, NULL) = 0 <0.000078>
write(5, "10.40.5.23 - - [03/Nov/2022:21:5"..., 124) = 124 <0.001097>
close(12) = 0 <0.000063>
close(4) = 0 <0.000091>
In newer nginx versions (since 1.21.4), this problem was worked around
by defaulting "sendfile_max_chunk" to 2 MiB:
https://github.com/nginx/nginx/commit/5636e7f7b4
Instead of asking userspace to provide an artificial upper limit, I'd
like the kernel to block for disk I/O at most once, and then pass back
control to userspace.
There is prior art for this kind of behavior in filemap_read():
/*
* If we've already successfully copied some data, then we
* can no longer safely return -EIOCBQUEUED. Hence mark
* an async read NOWAIT at that point.
*/
if ((iocb->ki_flags & IOCB_WAITQ) && already_read)
iocb->ki_flags |= IOCB_NOWAIT;
This modifies the caller-provided "struct kiocb", which has an effect
on repeated filemap_read() calls. This effect however vanishes
because the "struct kiocb" is not persistent; splice_direct_to_actor()
doesn't have one, and each generic_file_splice_read() call initializes
a new one, losing the "IOCB_NOWAIT" flag that was injected by
filemap_read().
There was no way to make generic_file_splice_read() aware that
IOCB_NOWAIT was desired because some data had already been transferred
in a previous call:
- checking whether the input file has O_NONBLOCK doesn't work because
this should be fixed even if the input file is not non-blocking
- the SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK flag is not appropriate because it affects
only whether pipe operations are non-blocking, not whether
file/socket operations are non-blocking
Since there are no other parameters, I suggest adding the
SPLICE_F_NOWAIT flag, which is similar to SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK, but
affects the "non-pipe" file descriptor passed to sendfile() or
splice(). It translates to IOCB_NOWAIT for regular files. For now, I
have documented the flag to be kernel-internal with a high bit, like
io_uring does with SPLICE_F_FD_IN_FIXED, but making this part of the
system call ABI may be a good idea as well.
Signed-off-by: Max Kellermann <max.kellermann@xxxxxxxxx>
---
fs/splice.c | 14 ++++++++++++++
include/linux/splice.h | 6 ++++++
2 files changed, 20 insertions(+)
diff --git a/fs/splice.c b/fs/splice.c
index d983d375ff11..c192321d5e37 100644
--- a/fs/splice.c
+++ b/fs/splice.c
@@ -361,6 +361,8 @@ ssize_t copy_splice_read(struct file *in, loff_t *ppos,
iov_iter_bvec(&to, ITER_DEST, bv, npages, len);
init_sync_kiocb(&kiocb, in);
kiocb.ki_pos = *ppos;
+ if (flags & SPLICE_F_NOWAIT)
+ kiocb.ki_flags |= IOCB_NOWAIT;
ret = call_read_iter(in, &kiocb, &to);
if (ret > 0) {
@@ -1070,6 +1072,18 @@ ssize_t splice_direct_to_actor(struct file *in, struct splice_desc *sd,
if (unlikely(ret <= 0))
goto read_failure;
+ /*
+ * After at least one byte was read from the input
+ * file, don't wait for blocking I/O in the following
+ * loop iterations; instead of blocking for arbitrary
+ * amounts of time in the kernel, let userspace decide
+ * how to proceed. This avoids excessive latency if
+ * the output is being consumed faster than the input
+ * file can fill it (e.g. sendfile() from a slow hard
+ * disk to a fast network).
+ */
+ flags |= SPLICE_F_NOWAIT;
+
read_len = ret;
sd->total_len = read_len;
diff --git a/include/linux/splice.h b/include/linux/splice.h
index 6c461573434d..abdf94759138 100644
--- a/include/linux/splice.h
+++ b/include/linux/splice.h
@@ -23,6 +23,12 @@
#define SPLICE_F_ALL (SPLICE_F_MOVE|SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK|SPLICE_F_MORE|SPLICE_F_GIFT)
+/*
+ * Don't wait for I/O (internal flag for the splice_direct_to_actor()
+ * loop).
+ */
+#define SPLICE_F_NOWAIT (1U << 30)
+
/*
* Passed to the actors
*/
--
2.39.2
