On Thu, 10 Jun 2010, Tejun Heo wrote:
quoted text
> > First, I think server side mmap might be nice to have but not strictly
> > necessary.  I looked at osspd and it just memcopies in and out of the
> > mmaped ring buffer.  Replacing those memcopies with explicit syscalls
> > to get and put the data should work fine.  I doubt that the latency or
> > CPU overhead introduced by the syscalls would actually matter in
> > practice.
> 
> The latency and CPU overhead perse aren't problematic and for osspd,
> copying in and out should be just fine as all update events are
> clearly denoted.

Good.

quoted text
> How does the kernel know when to issue store or retrieve?

No, it's userspace that initiates store and retrieve.

quoted text
> > Next thing is how to deal with multiple buffers for each char device.
> > For the above to continue to work we need to make sure there's a
> > separate nodeid associated with each buffer.  The most general thing
> > would be if MMAP reply contained a nodeid which identified the buffer.
> > 
> > Do you see any issues with the above?
> 
> It relates to the previous question but mmap can also be used without
> all updates being notified by some kind of event where the server is
> expected to watch the mmapped area and react which is okay if server
> can share the mapped page but if it has to poll by copying data out of
> kernel buffer each time, it can get prohibitively expensive unless it
> can ask kernel "what changes since when?" which would be pretty nasty
> to implement.

If necessary we could export page protection and page fault interfaces
to userspace, which would allow it to watch for changes.

But that's not needed for OSSP, right?

Thanks,
Miklos
--
unsubscribe notice
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/