linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] Export shmem_file_setup and shmem

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Message-Id: <200808192000.47070.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Date:	Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:46 +1000
From:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
To:	"Dave Airlie" <airlied@...il.com>
Cc:	"Keith Packard" <keithp@...thp.com>,
	"Christoph Hellwig" <hch@...radead.org>,
	"Eric Anholt" <eric@...olt.net>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Export shmem_file_setup and shmem_getpage for DRM-GEM

On Tuesday 19 August 2008 11:17, Dave Airlie wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 05 August 2008 07:58, Keith Packard wrote:
> >> On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 19:02 +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> >> > > I suppose we could have user space allocate the shmem file (either
> >> > > via tmpfs or sysv ipc). tmpfs suffers from the maxfd issue, while
> >> > > sysv ipc runs up against the SHMMAX value.
> >> >
> >> > This is how I'd suggested it work as well. I think a little bit
> >> > more effort should be spent looking at making this work.
> >>
> >> Well, I've spent a day thinking about using existing user-space APIs to
> >> get at shmem files. While it's nice that we've discovered a
> >> filesystem-independent mechanism to pin file pages, we haven't found
> >> anything similar for creating the files. In particular, what I want is:
> >>
> >>  1) Anonymous files backed by swap
> >>  2) Freed when the last process using them exits
> >>  3) That never appear in the file system
> >>  4) Do not consume a low FD (yeah, I know, rewrite the desktop)
> >>
> >> So, what I could do is
> >>
> >>       char    template[] = "/dev/shm/drm-XXXXXX";
> >>       int     fd;
> >>       fd = mkstemp (template);
> >>       unlink (template);
> >>       ftruncate (fd, size)
> >>       object = drm_create_an_object_for_a_file (fd);
> >>       close (fd);
> >>
> >> While I haven't written any code yet, this should work and will even be
> >> compatible with my current user-space API. I have to create a DRM object
> >> for the file in any case, and so I don't need to hold onto the fd.
> >> Releasing the fd also eliminates any ulimit issues.
> >>
> >> The drm_create_an_object_for_a_file call could return another fd. But,
> >> note that the original shmem fd has no real value to the application in
> >> this case.
> >>
> >> I can imagine other cases where mapping non-shmem files would make sense
> >> though, in particular it's fairly easy to envision mapping an image file
> >> to the GTT and having the graphics process decode and display it without
> >> any additional copies. I think this demonstrates the potential utility
> >> of the general file mapping operation.
> >>
> >> But, I'd like to have you reconsider whether it makes sense for user
> >> space to go through the above dance to create anonymous shared objects
> >> when the kernel already supports precisely the desired semantics and
> >> even exposes them to the ipc/shm implementation.
> >
> > In my opinion, doing this little song and dance (which is a few lines
> > of quite well defined APIs, btw) in userspace is preferable to adding
> > a single line or exporting a single function in kernel space. Unless
> > there is a better reason than eliminating a few lines of userspace code.
>
> Now I also have to do the same song and dance for in-kernel allocated
> objects? still think this is acceptable... I'm not even sure what vfs calls
> I really need in-kernel to do that.
>
> If someone codes up the in-kernel path to do this using 4-5 API calls
> instead of one exported
> function that IPC/SHM already does then maybe we can gauge the uglyness vs
> that.

Not exactly sure what you mean by this. But I would like to see an effort
made to use existing userspace APIs in order to do this swappable object
allocation over tmpfs scheme. As I said, I don't object to a nice kernel
implementation, but we would be in a much better position to assess it if
we had an existing userspace implementation to compare it with.
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