Re: [TUHS] non-blocking IO

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2020 at 08:19:58AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> The kicker is that all of the kernel is callback driven. The
> upper half queues the request and then sleeps until the lower half signals
> it to wakeup. And that signal is often just a wakeup done from the
> completion routine in the original request. All of that would be useful in
> userland for high volume activity, none of it is exposed...

Yeah, I've often wondered why this stuff wasn't exposed.  We already have
signal handlers, seems like that maps.  

I tried to get the NFS guys at Sun to rethink the biod junk and do it like
UFS does, where it queues something and gets a callback.  I strongly suspect
that two processes, one to queue, one to handle callbacks, would be more
efficient and actually faster than the biod nonsense.

That's one of the arguments I lost unfortunately.

Warner, exposing that stuff in FreeBSD is not really that hard, I suspect.
Might be a fun project for a young kernel hacker with some old dude like
you or me or someone, watching over it and thinking about the API.

--lm