On 12.08.2011 14:31, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 02:14:15PM +0200, Jan Schmidt wrote: >> (1) Normally, requests to the file system go through ioctls (on the fd >> of the mountpoint) and the result is small enough to be returned when >> the ioctl finishes. That said, I thought of passing a user land fd along >> with this ioctl to the kernel and make it dump the generated bits there. >> Only, I don't see how to turn a fd into a struct file pointer. And I >> don't know if that would be considered really ugly by a lot of people. > > struct file *filp = fget(fd); > ... > fput(filp); > > That said, why not have the ioctl mutate the existing fd? > ie in userspace: > > int fd = open("/mnt/btrfs"); > ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_STREAM); > while (...) { > read(fd, buf, 4096); > ... > } > close(fd); After thinking twice, this has a drawback: I'd have to track state between two read(2) calls, waiting for userspace to "pull" more data. In contrast, I'd rather use a "push" like approach, having the buffering done for me. Getting back to my suggestion (1, giving a fd to the kernel where the output is expected), that should look like this in userspace: - int fd; int pipefd[2]; struct io_args io_args; fd = open("/mnt/btrfs"); pipe(pipefd); io_agrs.dest = pipefd[0]; /* thread 1 */ ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_STREAM, &io_args); /* thread 2 */ while (...) { read(pipefd[1], buf, 4096); ... } - Any suggestions and opinions appreciated. Thanks, -Jan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html