mbox series

[RFC,-next,00/10] Add ZC notifications to splice and sendfile

Message ID 20250319001521.53249-1-jdamato@fastly.com (mailing list archive)
Headers show
Series Add ZC notifications to splice and sendfile | expand

Message

Joe Damato March 19, 2025, 12:15 a.m. UTC
Greetings:

Welcome to the RFC.

Currently, when a user app uses sendfile the user app has no way to know
if the bytes were transmit; sendfile simply returns, but it is possible
that a slow client on the other side may take time to receive and ACK
the bytes. In the meantime, the user app which called sendfile has no
way to know whether it can overwrite the data on disk that it just
sendfile'd.

One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
extensive work done by Pavel [1].

To support this, two important user ABI changes are proposed:

  - A new splice flag, SPLICE_F_ZC, which allows users to signal that
    splice should generate zerocopy notifications if possible.

  - A new system call, sendfile2, which is similar to sendfile64 except
    that it takes an additional argument, flags, which allows the user
    to specify either a "regular" sendfile or a sendfile with zerocopy
    notifications enabled.

In either case, user apps can read notifications from the error queue
(like they would with MSG_ZEROCOPY) to determine when their call to
sendfile has completed.

I tested this RFC using the selftest modified in the last patch and also
by using the selftest between two different physical hosts:

# server
./msg_zerocopy -4 -i eth0 -t 2 -v -r tcp

# client (does the sendfiling)
dd if=/dev/zero of=sendfile_data bs=1M count=8
./msg_zerocopy -4 -i eth0 -D $SERVER_IP -v -l 1 -t 2 -z -f sendfile_data tcp

I would love to get high level feedback from folks on a few things:

  - Is this functionality, at a high level, something that would be
    desirable / useful? I think so, but I'm of course I am biased ;)

  - Is this approach generally headed in the right direction? Are the
    proposed user ABI changes reasonable?

If the above two points are generally agreed upon then I'd welcome
feedback on the patches themselves :)

This is kind of a net thing, but also kind of a splice thing so hope I
am sending this to right places to get appropriate feedback. I based my
code on the vfs/for-next tree, but am happy to rebase on another tree if
desired. The cc-list got a little out of control, so I manually trimmed
it down quite a bit; sorry if I missed anyone I should have CC'd in the
process.

Thanks,
Joe

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/cover.1657643355.git.asml.silence@gmail.com/

Joe Damato (10):
  splice: Add ubuf_info to prepare for ZC
  splice: Add helper that passes through splice_desc
  splice: Factor splice_socket into a helper
  splice: Add SPLICE_F_ZC and attach ubuf
  fs: Add splice_write_sd to file operations
  fs: Extend do_sendfile to take a flags argument
  fs: Add sendfile2 which accepts a flags argument
  fs: Add sendfile flags for sendfile2
  fs: Add sendfile2 syscall
  selftests: Add sendfile zerocopy notification test

 arch/alpha/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl      |  1 +
 arch/arm/tools/syscall.tbl                  |  1 +
 arch/arm64/tools/syscall_32.tbl             |  1 +
 arch/m68k/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl       |  1 +
 arch/microblaze/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl |  1 +
 arch/mips/kernel/syscalls/syscall_n32.tbl   |  1 +
 arch/mips/kernel/syscalls/syscall_n64.tbl   |  1 +
 arch/mips/kernel/syscalls/syscall_o32.tbl   |  1 +
 arch/parisc/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl     |  1 +
 arch/powerpc/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl    |  1 +
 arch/s390/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl       |  1 +
 arch/sh/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl         |  1 +
 arch/sparc/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl      |  1 +
 arch/x86/entry/syscalls/syscall_32.tbl      |  1 +
 arch/x86/entry/syscalls/syscall_64.tbl      |  1 +
 arch/xtensa/kernel/syscalls/syscall.tbl     |  1 +
 fs/read_write.c                             | 40 +++++++---
 fs/splice.c                                 | 87 +++++++++++++++++----
 include/linux/fs.h                          |  2 +
 include/linux/sendfile.h                    | 10 +++
 include/linux/splice.h                      |  7 +-
 include/linux/syscalls.h                    |  2 +
 include/uapi/asm-generic/unistd.h           |  4 +-
 net/socket.c                                |  1 +
 scripts/syscall.tbl                         |  1 +
 tools/testing/selftests/net/msg_zerocopy.c  | 54 ++++++++++++-
 tools/testing/selftests/net/msg_zerocopy.sh |  5 ++
 27 files changed, 200 insertions(+), 29 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 include/linux/sendfile.h


base-commit: 2e72b1e0aac24a12f3bf3eec620efaca7ab7d4de

Comments

Christoph Hellwig March 19, 2025, 8:04 a.m. UTC | #1
On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 12:15:11AM +0000, Joe Damato wrote:
> One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
> to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
> extensive work done by Pavel [1].

What is a "zerocopy notification" and why aren't you simply plugging
this into io_uring and generate a CQE so that it works like all other
asynchronous operations?
Joe Damato March 19, 2025, 3:32 p.m. UTC | #2
On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 01:04:48AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 12:15:11AM +0000, Joe Damato wrote:
> > One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
> > to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
> > extensive work done by Pavel [1].
> 
> What is a "zerocopy notification" 

See the docs on MSG_ZEROCOPY [1], but in short when a user app calls
sendmsg and passes MSG_ZEROCOPY a completion notification is added
to the error queue. The user app can poll for these to find out when
the TX has completed and the buffer it passed to the kernel can be
overwritten.

My series provides the same functionality via splice and sendfile2.

[1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.13/networking/msg_zerocopy.html

> and why aren't you simply plugging this into io_uring and generate
> a CQE so that it works like all other asynchronous operations?

I linked to the iouring work that Pavel did in the cover letter.
Please take a look.

That work refactored the internals of how zerocopy completion
notifications are wired up, allowing other pieces of code to use the
same infrastructure and extend it, if needed.

My series is using the same internals that iouring (and others) use
to generate zerocopy completion notifications. Unlike iouring,
though, I don't need a fully customized implementation with a new
user API for harvesting completion events; I can use the existing
mechanism already in the kernel that user apps already use for
sendmsg (the error queue, as explained above and in the
MSG_ZEROCOPY documentation).

Let me know if that answers your question or if you have other
questions.

Thanks,
Joe
Jens Axboe March 19, 2025, 4:07 p.m. UTC | #3
On 3/19/25 9:32 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 01:04:48AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 12:15:11AM +0000, Joe Damato wrote:
>>> One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
>>> to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
>>> extensive work done by Pavel [1].
>>
>> What is a "zerocopy notification" 
> 
> See the docs on MSG_ZEROCOPY [1], but in short when a user app calls
> sendmsg and passes MSG_ZEROCOPY a completion notification is added
> to the error queue. The user app can poll for these to find out when
> the TX has completed and the buffer it passed to the kernel can be
> overwritten.
> 
> My series provides the same functionality via splice and sendfile2.
> 
> [1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.13/networking/msg_zerocopy.html
> 
>> and why aren't you simply plugging this into io_uring and generate
>> a CQE so that it works like all other asynchronous operations?
> 
> I linked to the iouring work that Pavel did in the cover letter.
> Please take a look.
> 
> That work refactored the internals of how zerocopy completion
> notifications are wired up, allowing other pieces of code to use the
> same infrastructure and extend it, if needed.
> 
> My series is using the same internals that iouring (and others) use
> to generate zerocopy completion notifications. Unlike iouring,
> though, I don't need a fully customized implementation with a new
> user API for harvesting completion events; I can use the existing
> mechanism already in the kernel that user apps already use for
> sendmsg (the error queue, as explained above and in the
> MSG_ZEROCOPY documentation).

The error queue is arguably a work-around for _not_ having a delivery
mechanism that works with a sync syscall in the first place. The main
question here imho would be "why add a whole new syscall etc when
there's already an existing way to do accomplish this, with
free-to-reuse notifications". If the answer is "because splice", then it
would seem saner to plumb up those bits only. Would be much simpler
too...
Joe Damato March 19, 2025, 5:04 p.m. UTC | #4
On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 10:07:27AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 3/19/25 9:32 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 01:04:48AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> >> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 12:15:11AM +0000, Joe Damato wrote:
> >>> One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
> >>> to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
> >>> extensive work done by Pavel [1].
> >>
> >> What is a "zerocopy notification" 
> > 
> > See the docs on MSG_ZEROCOPY [1], but in short when a user app calls
> > sendmsg and passes MSG_ZEROCOPY a completion notification is added
> > to the error queue. The user app can poll for these to find out when
> > the TX has completed and the buffer it passed to the kernel can be
> > overwritten.
> > 
> > My series provides the same functionality via splice and sendfile2.
> > 
> > [1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.13/networking/msg_zerocopy.html
> > 
> >> and why aren't you simply plugging this into io_uring and generate
> >> a CQE so that it works like all other asynchronous operations?
> > 
> > I linked to the iouring work that Pavel did in the cover letter.
> > Please take a look.
> > 
> > That work refactored the internals of how zerocopy completion
> > notifications are wired up, allowing other pieces of code to use the
> > same infrastructure and extend it, if needed.
> > 
> > My series is using the same internals that iouring (and others) use
> > to generate zerocopy completion notifications. Unlike iouring,
> > though, I don't need a fully customized implementation with a new
> > user API for harvesting completion events; I can use the existing
> > mechanism already in the kernel that user apps already use for
> > sendmsg (the error queue, as explained above and in the
> > MSG_ZEROCOPY documentation).
> 
> The error queue is arguably a work-around for _not_ having a delivery
> mechanism that works with a sync syscall in the first place. The main
> question here imho would be "why add a whole new syscall etc when
> there's already an existing way to do accomplish this, with
> free-to-reuse notifications". If the answer is "because splice", then it
> would seem saner to plumb up those bits only. Would be much simpler
> too...

I may be misunderstanding your comment, but my response would be:

  There are existing apps which use sendfile today unsafely and
  it would be very nice to have a safe sendfile equivalent. Converting
  existing apps to using iouring (if I understood your suggestion?)
  would be significantly more work compared to calling sendfile2 and
  adding code to check the error queue.

I would also argue that there are likely user apps out there that
use both sendmsg MSG_ZEROCOPY for certain writes (for data in
memory) and also use sendfile (for data on disk). One example would
be a reverse proxy that might write HTTP headers to clients via
sendmsg but transmit the response body with sendfile.

For those apps, the code to check the error queue already exists for
sendmsg + MSG_ZEROCOPY, so swapping in sendfile2 seems like an easy
way to ensure safe sendfile usage.

As far as the bit about plumbing only the splice bits, sorry if I'm
being dense here, do you mean plumbing the error queue through to
splice only and dropping sendfile2?

That is an option. Then the apps currently using sendfile could use
splice instead and get completion notifications on the error queue.
That would probably work and be less work than rewriting to use
iouring, but probably a bit more work than using a new syscall.

Thanks for taking a look and responding.
Jens Axboe March 19, 2025, 5:20 p.m. UTC | #5
On 3/19/25 11:04 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 10:07:27AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
>> On 3/19/25 9:32 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 01:04:48AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 12:15:11AM +0000, Joe Damato wrote:
>>>>> One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
>>>>> to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
>>>>> extensive work done by Pavel [1].
>>>>
>>>> What is a "zerocopy notification" 
>>>
>>> See the docs on MSG_ZEROCOPY [1], but in short when a user app calls
>>> sendmsg and passes MSG_ZEROCOPY a completion notification is added
>>> to the error queue. The user app can poll for these to find out when
>>> the TX has completed and the buffer it passed to the kernel can be
>>> overwritten.
>>>
>>> My series provides the same functionality via splice and sendfile2.
>>>
>>> [1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.13/networking/msg_zerocopy.html
>>>
>>>> and why aren't you simply plugging this into io_uring and generate
>>>> a CQE so that it works like all other asynchronous operations?
>>>
>>> I linked to the iouring work that Pavel did in the cover letter.
>>> Please take a look.
>>>
>>> That work refactored the internals of how zerocopy completion
>>> notifications are wired up, allowing other pieces of code to use the
>>> same infrastructure and extend it, if needed.
>>>
>>> My series is using the same internals that iouring (and others) use
>>> to generate zerocopy completion notifications. Unlike iouring,
>>> though, I don't need a fully customized implementation with a new
>>> user API for harvesting completion events; I can use the existing
>>> mechanism already in the kernel that user apps already use for
>>> sendmsg (the error queue, as explained above and in the
>>> MSG_ZEROCOPY documentation).
>>
>> The error queue is arguably a work-around for _not_ having a delivery
>> mechanism that works with a sync syscall in the first place. The main
>> question here imho would be "why add a whole new syscall etc when
>> there's already an existing way to do accomplish this, with
>> free-to-reuse notifications". If the answer is "because splice", then it
>> would seem saner to plumb up those bits only. Would be much simpler
>> too...
> 
> I may be misunderstanding your comment, but my response would be:
> 
>   There are existing apps which use sendfile today unsafely and
>   it would be very nice to have a safe sendfile equivalent. Converting
>   existing apps to using iouring (if I understood your suggestion?)
>   would be significantly more work compared to calling sendfile2 and
>   adding code to check the error queue.

It's really not, if you just want to use it as a sync kind of thing. If
you want to have multiple things in flight etc, yeah it could be more
work, you'd also get better performance that way. And you could use
things like registered buffers for either of them, which again would
likely make it more efficient.

If you just use it as a sync thing, it'd be pretty trivial to just wrap
a my_sendfile_foo() in a submit_and_wait operation, which issues and
waits on the completion in a single syscall. And if you want to wait on
the notification too, you could even do that in the same syscall and
wait on 2 CQEs. That'd be a downright trivial way to provide a sync way
of doing the same thing.

> I would also argue that there are likely user apps out there that
> use both sendmsg MSG_ZEROCOPY for certain writes (for data in
> memory) and also use sendfile (for data on disk). One example would
> be a reverse proxy that might write HTTP headers to clients via
> sendmsg but transmit the response body with sendfile.
> 
> For those apps, the code to check the error queue already exists for
> sendmsg + MSG_ZEROCOPY, so swapping in sendfile2 seems like an easy
> way to ensure safe sendfile usage.

Sure that is certainly possible. I didn't say that wasn't the case,
rather that the error queue approach is a work-around in the first place
for not having some kind of async notification mechanism for when it's
free to reuse.

> As far as the bit about plumbing only the splice bits, sorry if I'm
> being dense here, do you mean plumbing the error queue through to
> splice only and dropping sendfile2?
> 
> That is an option. Then the apps currently using sendfile could use
> splice instead and get completion notifications on the error queue.
> That would probably work and be less work than rewriting to use
> iouring, but probably a bit more work than using a new syscall.

Yep
Joe Damato March 19, 2025, 5:45 p.m. UTC | #6
On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 11:20:50AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 3/19/25 11:04 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 10:07:27AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
> >> On 3/19/25 9:32 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
> >>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 01:04:48AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> >>>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 12:15:11AM +0000, Joe Damato wrote:
> >>>>> One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
> >>>>> to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
> >>>>> extensive work done by Pavel [1].
> >>>>
> >>>> What is a "zerocopy notification" 
> >>>
> >>> See the docs on MSG_ZEROCOPY [1], but in short when a user app calls
> >>> sendmsg and passes MSG_ZEROCOPY a completion notification is added
> >>> to the error queue. The user app can poll for these to find out when
> >>> the TX has completed and the buffer it passed to the kernel can be
> >>> overwritten.
> >>>
> >>> My series provides the same functionality via splice and sendfile2.
> >>>
> >>> [1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.13/networking/msg_zerocopy.html
> >>>
> >>>> and why aren't you simply plugging this into io_uring and generate
> >>>> a CQE so that it works like all other asynchronous operations?
> >>>
> >>> I linked to the iouring work that Pavel did in the cover letter.
> >>> Please take a look.
> >>>
> >>> That work refactored the internals of how zerocopy completion
> >>> notifications are wired up, allowing other pieces of code to use the
> >>> same infrastructure and extend it, if needed.
> >>>
> >>> My series is using the same internals that iouring (and others) use
> >>> to generate zerocopy completion notifications. Unlike iouring,
> >>> though, I don't need a fully customized implementation with a new
> >>> user API for harvesting completion events; I can use the existing
> >>> mechanism already in the kernel that user apps already use for
> >>> sendmsg (the error queue, as explained above and in the
> >>> MSG_ZEROCOPY documentation).
> >>
> >> The error queue is arguably a work-around for _not_ having a delivery
> >> mechanism that works with a sync syscall in the first place. The main
> >> question here imho would be "why add a whole new syscall etc when
> >> there's already an existing way to do accomplish this, with
> >> free-to-reuse notifications". If the answer is "because splice", then it
> >> would seem saner to plumb up those bits only. Would be much simpler
> >> too...
> > 
> > I may be misunderstanding your comment, but my response would be:
> > 
> >   There are existing apps which use sendfile today unsafely and
> >   it would be very nice to have a safe sendfile equivalent. Converting
> >   existing apps to using iouring (if I understood your suggestion?)
> >   would be significantly more work compared to calling sendfile2 and
> >   adding code to check the error queue.
> 
> It's really not, if you just want to use it as a sync kind of thing. If
> you want to have multiple things in flight etc, yeah it could be more
> work, you'd also get better performance that way. And you could use
> things like registered buffers for either of them, which again would
> likely make it more efficient.

I haven't argued that performance would be better using sendfile2
compared to iouring, just that existing apps which already use
sendfile (but do so unsafely) would probably be more likely to use a
safe alternative with existing examples of how to harvest completion
notifications vs something more complex, like wrapping iouring.

> If you just use it as a sync thing, it'd be pretty trivial to just wrap
> a my_sendfile_foo() in a submit_and_wait operation, which issues and
> waits on the completion in a single syscall. And if you want to wait on
> the notification too, you could even do that in the same syscall and
> wait on 2 CQEs. That'd be a downright trivial way to provide a sync way
> of doing the same thing.

I don't disagree; I just don't know if app developers:
  a.) know that this is possible to do, and
  b.) know how to do it

In general: it does seem a bit odd to me that there isn't a safe
sendfile syscall in Linux that uses existing completion notification
mechanisms.

> > I would also argue that there are likely user apps out there that
> > use both sendmsg MSG_ZEROCOPY for certain writes (for data in
> > memory) and also use sendfile (for data on disk). One example would
> > be a reverse proxy that might write HTTP headers to clients via
> > sendmsg but transmit the response body with sendfile.
> > 
> > For those apps, the code to check the error queue already exists for
> > sendmsg + MSG_ZEROCOPY, so swapping in sendfile2 seems like an easy
> > way to ensure safe sendfile usage.
> 
> Sure that is certainly possible. I didn't say that wasn't the case,
> rather that the error queue approach is a work-around in the first place
> for not having some kind of async notification mechanism for when it's
> free to reuse.

Of course, I certainly agree that the error queue is a work around.
But it works, app use it, and its fairly well known. I don't see any
reason, other than historical context, why sendmsg can use this
mechanism, splice can, but sendfile shouldn't?

> > As far as the bit about plumbing only the splice bits, sorry if I'm
> > being dense here, do you mean plumbing the error queue through to
> > splice only and dropping sendfile2?
> > 
> > That is an option. Then the apps currently using sendfile could use
> > splice instead and get completion notifications on the error queue.
> > That would probably work and be less work than rewriting to use
> > iouring, but probably a bit more work than using a new syscall.
> 
> Yep

I'm not opposed to dropping the sendfile2 part of the series for the
official submission. I do think it is a bit odd to add the
functionality to splice only, though, when probably many apps are
using splice via calls to sendfile and there is no way to safely use
sendfile.

If you feel very strongly that this cannot be merged without
dropping sendfile2 and only plumbing this through for splice, then
I'll drop the sendfile2 syscall when I submit officially (probably
next week?).

I do feel pretty strongly that it's more likely apps would use
sendfile2 and we'd have safer apps out in the wild. But, I could be
wrong.

That said: if the new syscsall is the blocker, I'll drop it and
offer a change to the sendfile man page suggesting users swap it
with calls to splice + error queue for safety.

I greatly appreciate you taking a look and your feedback.

Thanks,
Joe
Jens Axboe March 19, 2025, 6:37 p.m. UTC | #7
On 3/19/25 11:45 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 11:20:50AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
>> On 3/19/25 11:04 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 10:07:27AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>> On 3/19/25 9:32 AM, Joe Damato wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 01:04:48AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 12:15:11AM +0000, Joe Damato wrote:
>>>>>>> One way to fix this is to add zerocopy notifications to sendfile similar
>>>>>>> to how MSG_ZEROCOPY works with sendmsg. This is possible thanks to the
>>>>>>> extensive work done by Pavel [1].
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What is a "zerocopy notification" 
>>>>>
>>>>> See the docs on MSG_ZEROCOPY [1], but in short when a user app calls
>>>>> sendmsg and passes MSG_ZEROCOPY a completion notification is added
>>>>> to the error queue. The user app can poll for these to find out when
>>>>> the TX has completed and the buffer it passed to the kernel can be
>>>>> overwritten.
>>>>>
>>>>> My series provides the same functionality via splice and sendfile2.
>>>>>
>>>>> [1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.13/networking/msg_zerocopy.html
>>>>>
>>>>>> and why aren't you simply plugging this into io_uring and generate
>>>>>> a CQE so that it works like all other asynchronous operations?
>>>>>
>>>>> I linked to the iouring work that Pavel did in the cover letter.
>>>>> Please take a look.
>>>>>
>>>>> That work refactored the internals of how zerocopy completion
>>>>> notifications are wired up, allowing other pieces of code to use the
>>>>> same infrastructure and extend it, if needed.
>>>>>
>>>>> My series is using the same internals that iouring (and others) use
>>>>> to generate zerocopy completion notifications. Unlike iouring,
>>>>> though, I don't need a fully customized implementation with a new
>>>>> user API for harvesting completion events; I can use the existing
>>>>> mechanism already in the kernel that user apps already use for
>>>>> sendmsg (the error queue, as explained above and in the
>>>>> MSG_ZEROCOPY documentation).
>>>>
>>>> The error queue is arguably a work-around for _not_ having a delivery
>>>> mechanism that works with a sync syscall in the first place. The main
>>>> question here imho would be "why add a whole new syscall etc when
>>>> there's already an existing way to do accomplish this, with
>>>> free-to-reuse notifications". If the answer is "because splice", then it
>>>> would seem saner to plumb up those bits only. Would be much simpler
>>>> too...
>>>
>>> I may be misunderstanding your comment, but my response would be:
>>>
>>>   There are existing apps which use sendfile today unsafely and
>>>   it would be very nice to have a safe sendfile equivalent. Converting
>>>   existing apps to using iouring (if I understood your suggestion?)
>>>   would be significantly more work compared to calling sendfile2 and
>>>   adding code to check the error queue.
>>
>> It's really not, if you just want to use it as a sync kind of thing. If
>> you want to have multiple things in flight etc, yeah it could be more
>> work, you'd also get better performance that way. And you could use
>> things like registered buffers for either of them, which again would
>> likely make it more efficient.
> 
> I haven't argued that performance would be better using sendfile2
> compared to iouring, just that existing apps which already use
> sendfile (but do so unsafely) would probably be more likely to use a
> safe alternative with existing examples of how to harvest completion
> notifications vs something more complex, like wrapping iouring.

Sure and I get that, just not sure it'd be worth doing on the kernel
side for such (fairly) weak reasoning. The performance benefit is just a
side note in that if you did do it this way, you'd potentially be able
to run it more efficiently too. And regardless what people do or use
now, they are generally always interested in that aspect.

>> If you just use it as a sync thing, it'd be pretty trivial to just wrap
>> a my_sendfile_foo() in a submit_and_wait operation, which issues and
>> waits on the completion in a single syscall. And if you want to wait on
>> the notification too, you could even do that in the same syscall and
>> wait on 2 CQEs. That'd be a downright trivial way to provide a sync way
>> of doing the same thing.
> 
> I don't disagree; I just don't know if app developers:
>   a.) know that this is possible to do, and
>   b.) know how to do it

Writing that wrapper would be not even a screenful of code. Yes maybe
they don't know how to do it now, but it's _really_ trivial to do. It'd
take me roughly 1 min to do that, would be happy to help out with that
side so it could go into a commit or man page or whatever.

> In general: it does seem a bit odd to me that there isn't a safe
> sendfile syscall in Linux that uses existing completion notification
> mechanisms.

Pretty natural, I think. sendfile(2) predates that by quite a bit, and
the last real change to sendfile was using splice underneath. Which I
did, and that was probably almost 20 years ago at this point...

I do think it makes sense to have a sendfile that's both fast and
efficient, and can be used sanely with buffer reuse without relying on
odd heuristics.

>>> I would also argue that there are likely user apps out there that
>>> use both sendmsg MSG_ZEROCOPY for certain writes (for data in
>>> memory) and also use sendfile (for data on disk). One example would
>>> be a reverse proxy that might write HTTP headers to clients via
>>> sendmsg but transmit the response body with sendfile.
>>>
>>> For those apps, the code to check the error queue already exists for
>>> sendmsg + MSG_ZEROCOPY, so swapping in sendfile2 seems like an easy
>>> way to ensure safe sendfile usage.
>>
>> Sure that is certainly possible. I didn't say that wasn't the case,
>> rather that the error queue approach is a work-around in the first place
>> for not having some kind of async notification mechanism for when it's
>> free to reuse.
> 
> Of course, I certainly agree that the error queue is a work around.
> But it works, app use it, and its fairly well known. I don't see any
> reason, other than historical context, why sendmsg can use this
> mechanism, splice can, but sendfile shouldn't?

My argument would be the same as for other features - if you can do it
simpler this other way, why not consider that? The end result would be
the same, you can do fast sendfile() with sane buffer reuse. But the
kernel side would be simpler, which is always a kernel main goal for
those of us that have to maintain it.

Just adding sendfile2() works in the sense that it's an easier drop in
replacement for an app, though the error queue side does mean it needs
to change anyway - it's not just replacing one syscall with another. And
if we want to be lazy, sure that's fine. I just don't think it's the
best way to do it when we literally have a mechanism that's designed for
this and works with reuse already with normal send zc (and receive side
too, in the next kernel).