On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 09:59:00AM -0500, Trond Myklebust wrote: > On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 17:27 -0500, J. Bruce Fields wrote: > > On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 02:42:38PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote: > > > On 12/14/2011 02:27 PM, Al Viro wrote: > > > >On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 02:22:07PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote: > > > > > > > >>We had an active thread a couple of years back that came out of the > > > >>reflink work and, at the time, there seemed to be moderately > > > >>positive support for adding a new system call that would fit this > > > >>use case (Joel Becker's copyfile()). > > > >> > > > >>Can we resurrect this effort? Is copyfile() still a good way to go, > > > >>or should we look at other hooks? > > > >copyfile(2) is probably a good way to go, provided that we do _not_ > > > >go baroque as it had happened the last time syscall had been discussed. > > > > > > > >IOW, to hell with progress reports, etc. - just a fastpath kind of > > > >thing, in the same kind of relationship to cp(1) as rename(2) is to mv(1). > > > >If it works - fine, if not - caller has to be ready to deal with handling > > > >cross-device case anyway. > > > > > > I think that this approach makes a lot of sense. Most of the > > > devices/targets that support the copy offload, will do it in very > > > reasonable amounts of time. > > > > The current NFSv4.2 draft rolls both the "fast" and "slow" cases into > > one operation: > > > > http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-nfsv4-minorversion2-06#section-2 > > > > Perhaps we should ask for separate operations for the two cases. (Or at > > least a "please don't bother if this is going to take 8 hours" flag....) > > How would the server know? I suggest we deal with this by adding an > ioctl() to allow the application to poll for progress: I'm assuming now > that we don't expect more than 1 copyfile() system call at a time per > file descriptor... If we're using this to copy VM image files, I could easily imagine wanting to clone multiple copies of the VM in parallel. -chris -- 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
