Re: Plans for 1.5

[Jason <jason@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
> 			    STAGE 2 - I/O Subsystem
> 			    Starting early February!

What are your thoughts on also adding a new flag to madvise to prefault 
pages, so as to avoid faults through the VM system?

Perhaps a flag named MADV_PREFAULT, or to be consistent with 
MADV_WILLNEED, MADV_NEEDNOW. Of course, such a call would be limited to 
a maximum size per call, which is queryable, etc.

As I recall, this is one of your main points for using buffered 
read/write calls instead of mmap. This could be even more significant 
with faults causing page-ins from cross-system boundaries.


Also, how about extending sendfile to behave as a general copyfile, or 
simply adding a general copyfile syscall?

With a framework like CCMS it would seem that such operations could 
easily be turned into a simple message passed to the file's source 
system for direct copying. Such a call could perhapes even be an async. 
operation with a method for querying progress via select/poll/kqueue.

- Jason