[TUHS] Excise process from a pipe

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    >> From: Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>

    >> The spec below isn't hard: just hook two buffer chains together and
    >> twiddle a couple of file desciptors.

    > In thinking about how to implement it, I was thinking that if there was
    > any buffered data in an output pipe, that the process doing the
    > splice() would wait (inside the splice() system call) on all the
    > buffered data being read by the down-stream process.
    > ...
    > As a side-benefit, if one adopted that line, one wouldn't have to deal
    > with the case (in the middle of the chain) of a pipe-pipe splice with u
    > buffered data in both pipes (where one would have to copy the data
    > across); instead one could just use the exact same code for both cases

So a couple of days ago I suffered a Big Hack Attack and actually wrote the
code for splice() (for V6, of course :-).

It took me a day or so to get 'mostly' running. (I got tripped up by pointer
arithmetic issues in a number of places, because V6 declares just about
_everything_ to be "int *", so e.g. "ip + 1" doesn't produce the right value
for sleep() if ip is declared to be "struct inode *", which is what I did
automatically.)

My code only had one real bug so far (I forgot to mark the user's channels as
closed, which resulted in their file entries getting sub-zero usage counts
when the middle (departing) process exited).


However, now I have run across a real problem: I was just copying the system
file table entry for the middle process' input channel over to the entry for
the downstream's input (so further reads on its part would read the channel
the middle process used to be reading). Copying the data from one entry to
another meant I didn't have to go chase down file table pointers in the other
process' U structure, etc.

Alas, this simple approach doesn't work.

Using the approach I outlined (where the middle channel waits for the
downstream pipe to be empty, so it can discard it and do the splice by
copying the file table entries) doesn't work, because the downstream process
is in the middle of a read call (waiting for more data to be put in the
pipe), and it has already computed a pointer to the pipe's inode, and it's
looping waiting for that inode to have data.

So now I have to regroup and figure out how to deal with that. My most likely
approach is to copy the inode data across (so I don't have to go mess with the
downstream process to get it to go look at another inode), but i) I want to
think about it a bit first, and ii) I have to check that it won't screw
anything else up if I move the inode data to another slot.

	Noel