On Tue, 22 Dec 2020 06:36:16 PST (-0800), snitzer@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, Dec 22 2020 at 8:32am -0500, Christoph Hellwig hch@infradead.org wrote:
On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 07:00:57PM -0800, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
I haven't gotten a whole lot of feedback, so I'm inclined to at least have some reasonable performance numbers before bothering with a v2.
FYI, my other main worry beside duplicating nbd is that device mapper really is a stacked interface that sits on top of other block device. Turning this into something else that just pipes data to userspace seems very strange.
I agree. Only way I'd be interested is if it somehow tackled enabling much more efficient IO. Earlier discussion in this thread mentioned that zero-copy and low overhead wasn't a priority (because it is hard, etc). But the hard work has already been done with io_uring. If dm-user had a prereq of leaning heavily on io_uring and also enabled IO polling for bio-based then there may be a win to supporting it.
But unless lower latency (or some other more significant win) is made possible I just don't care to prop up an unnatural DM bolt-on.
I don't remember if I mentioned this in the thread, but it was definately in the Plumbers talk, but I'd had the general idea bouncing around that it would be possible to write a high-performance version of this using an interface similar to the one provided here while relying on io_uring for the high-performance userspace. That definately won't work with exactly the current interface, but my hope was to avoid writing my own high-performance ring buffer. My worry was that it'll be too tricky to map this all to zero-copy, and I guess I forgot about it.
Now that you bring it up, it certainly seems worth taking a shot at. We'd essentially have the best of both worlds: userspace implementations that want to be simple could just use read()/write(), while those that want to be higher performance could have their implicit ring buffer.
I'm currently trying to put together a benchmarking setup that is of sufficient fidelity that I would believe the numbers, which is really why I don't have any performance numbers yet (no sense posting numbers I would shoot down :)). I'll try to remember to take a shot at an io_uring based userspace (probably with some dm-user interface modifications) to see how it feels.