In this patch series I am trying to take another stab at zero copy.
Please review and provide your feedback.
Goal:
9P Linux client makes an additional copy of read/write buffer into the kernel
buffer. There are some transports(especially in the virtualization
environment) which can avoid this additional copy by directly sending user
buffer to the server.
Design Goals.
- Have minimal changes to the net layer so that common code is not polluted by
the transport specifics.
- Create a common transport library which can be used by other transports.
- Avoid additional optimizations in the initial attempt (more details below)
and focus on achieving basic functionality.
Design
Send the payload buffers separately to the transport layer if it asks for it.
Transport layer specifies the preference through newly introduced field in the
transport module. (clnt->trans_mod->pref)
This method has few advantages.
- Keeps the net layer clean and lets the transport layer deal with specifics.
- mapping user addr into kernel pages pins the memory. Lack of flow control
make the system vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. This change gives
transport layer more control to implement effective flow control.
- If a transport layer doesn't see the need to handle payload separately,
it can set the preference accordingly so that current code works with no
changes. This is very useful for transports which has no plans of
converting/pinning user pages. Especially things become more complex as
copy_to_user() is not possible as reads(RREAD) are handled by the
transport layer in the interrupt context.
TREAD/RERROR scenario.
This is a rather sticky issue to deal with for the !dotl protocol. This is not
a problem in 9P2000.L as the error is a known size (errno) but in other
protocols it is a string of size (ERRMAX). To take care of TREAD/RERROR
scenario in !dotl we make sure that the read buffer is big enough to
accommodate ERRMAX string. If the read size is small, don't send the payload
buffer separately to the transport layer even if it set its preferences other
way (P9_TRANS_PREF_PAYLOAD_SEP).
For bigger reads, RERROR is handled by copying back user buffers into kernel
buffer in the case of error. As this is done only in the error path it should
not affect the regular performance.
Created trans_common.[ch] to house common functions so that other transport
layers can take advantage of them.
msize: One of the major advantage of this patch series is to have bigger msize
to pull off bigger read/writes from the server. Increasing the msize is not
really a solution as majority of other transactions are extremely small which
could result in waste of kernel heap. To address this problem we need to have
two sizes of PDUs.
Given that this is an additional optimization/usecase of zero copy..and not a
NEED to implement zerocopy itself, I am differing it to next round of changes.
Signed-off-by: Venkateswararao Jujjuri <jvrao@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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