linux-kernel - Re: New copyfile system call

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Date:	Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:16:10 -0800
From:	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To:	"Myklebust, Trond" <Trond.Myklebust@...app.com>
Cc:	Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@...hat.com>, Zach Brown <zab@...hat.com>,
	Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
	Linux FS Devel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"Chris L. Mason" <clmason@...ionio.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Alexander Viro <aviro@...hat.com>,
	"Martin K. Petersen" <mkp@....net>, Hannes Reinecke <hare@...e.de>,
	Joel Becker <jlbec@...lplan.org>
Subject: Re: New copyfile system call - discuss before LSF?

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 1:59 PM, Myklebust, Trond
<Trond.Myklebust@...app.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-02-25 at 16:49 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>> On 02/25/2013 04:14 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> > On 02/21/2013 02:24 PM, Zach Brown wrote:
>> >> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 08:50:27PM +0000, Myklebust, Trond wrote:
>> >>> On Thu, 2013-02-21 at 21:00 +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> >>>> Il 21/02/2013 15:57, Ric Wheeler ha scritto:
>> >>>>>> sendfile64() pretty much already has the right arguments for a
>> >>>>>> "copyfile", however it would be nice to add a 'flags' parameter: the
>> >>>>>> NFSv4.2 version would use that to specify whether or not to copy file
>> >>>>>> metadata.
>> >>>>> That would seem to be enough to me and has the advantage that it is an
>> >>>>> relatively obvious extension to something that is at least not totally
>> >>>>> unknown to developers.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Do we need more than that for non-NFS paths I wonder? What does reflink
>> >>>>> need or the SCSI mechanism?
>> >>>> For virt we would like to be able to specify arbitrary block ranges.
>> >>>> Copying an entire file helps some copy operations like storage
>> >>>> migration.  However, it is not enough to convert the guest's offloaded
>> >>>> copies to host-side offloaded copies.
>> >>> So how would a system call based on sendfile64() plus my flag parameter
>> >>> prevent an underlying implementation from meeting your criterion?
>> >> If I'm guessing correctly, sendfile64()+flags would be annoying because
>> >> it's missing an out_fd_offset.  The host will want to offload the
>> >> guest's copies by calling sendfile on block ranges of a guest disk image
>> >> file that correspond to the mappings of the in and out files in the
>> >> guest.
>> >>
>> >> You could make it work with some locking and out_fd seeking to set the
>> >> write offset before calling sendfile64()+flags, but ugh.
>> >>
>> >>   ssize_t sendfile(int out_fd, int in_fd, off_t in_offset, off_t
>> >>                    out_offset, size_t count, int flags);
>> >>
>> >> That seems closer.
>> >>
>> >> We might also want to pre-emptively offer iovs instead of offsets,
>> >> because that's the very first thing that's going to be requested after
>> >> people prototype having to iterate calling sendfile() for each
>> >> contiguous copy region.
>> > I thought the first thing people would ask for is to atomically create a
>> > new file and copy the old file into it (at least on local file systems).
>> >   The idea is that nothing should see an empty destination file, either
>> > by race or by crash.  (This feature would perhaps be described as a
>> > pony, but it should be implementable.)
>> >
>> > This would be like a better link(2).
>> >
>> > --Andy
>>
>> Why would this need to be atomic? That would seem to be a very difficult
>> property to provide across all target types with multi-GB sized files...
>
> Right. It may sound cool, but what's the real-life use case?
>

Download file from some source and then verify it.  Now copyfile it
into my repository of known-good files.

Admittedly I could link + unlink or rename it there, but I consider
hard links to be rather evil, especially when cow links are available.


--Andy
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