Re: [PATCH 1/3 v2] chunkd: remove sendfile(2) zero-copy support

On 07/17/2010 11:45 PM, Steven Dake wrote:
> On 07/16/2010 10:46 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> chunkd: remove sendfile(2) zero-copy support
>>
>> chunkd will be soon checksumming data in main memory. That removes
>> the utility of a zero-copy interface which bypasses the on-heap
>> data requirement.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Jeff Garzik<[email protected]>

> May be able to use vmsplice with sendfile (if linux is only target
> platform). Haven't tried it myself, but the operations look interesting
> at achieving zero copy with sockets from memory addresses.

Even though the man pages say "only for pipes", this syscall definitely 
works with TCP.  The big question:  is it actually faster than 
read()+write() ?

Years ago, I experimented with using some fancy new Linux-specific 
syscalls in a from-scratch implementation of cp(1).  It turned out that 
read()+write() was faster than other methods.

That was file->file copying.  It's probably worth investigating 
vmsplice() for our file->checksum->TCP case, definitely.

	Jeff