[TUHS] UNIX on S/370

[Warner Losh]

On Nov 20, 2017 8:51 PM, "Larry McVoy" <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

Actually, how common was that?  I know at SGI we did that with O_DIRECT
on files (and just automatically on the way for in networking and page
flipped on the way out).  But it was a pile of work, you had to lock
all the pages so that the pageout daemon didn't page them out, etc.

So under what circumstances would Unix do DMA to/from user buffers
rather than bcopy it?


I assume you aren't talking about things like mmap where you can't really
bcopy it...

At Fusion I/O we had hooks into our PCIe flash card driver that would do
DMA directly into user buffers (since we wanted IOPS and any extra copies
got in the way of that). We also played fun tricks with 'extended I/O
primitives' that were implemented with ioctls, but still did I/O to/from
user buffers. This was so we could construct 1 transaction for what's
basically an atomic writev (more complicated than that, because the atomic
operation also supported delete/trim operations at the same time). This was
to simplify checkpointing since it was an all or nothing thing: if we
couldn't do it, or the system crashed in the middle, the transaction never
happened. There were other, more extended I/O operations that involved read
as well that were kinda crazy, but useful for a market segment we did well
in. Also likely no the sort of thing that you were thinking about, but it
was a novel use of DMA to user buffers.

Warner

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 10:15:58PM -0500, Ron Natalie wrote:
> That's a common optimization, but the only real requirement in the UNIX
> kernel is the raw I/O bypasses the kernel buffer cache.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Noel Chiappa
> Sent: Monday, November 20, 2017 9:57 PM
> To: tuhs at tuhs.org
> Cc: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX on S/370
>
>     > From: Larry McVoy
>
>     > So tape I can see being more weird, but isn't raw disk just "don't
put
>     > it in buffer cache"?
>
> One machines/controllers which are capable of it, with raw devices DMA
> happens directly into the buffers in the process (which obviously has to
be
> resident while the I/O is happening).
>
>     Noel

--
---
Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
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