copy on write for splice() from file to pipe?

[Stefan Metzmacher]

Hi Linus,

> Adding Jens, because he's one of the main splice people. You do seem
> to be stepping on his work ;)
> 
> Jens, see
> 
>    https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/0cfd9f02-dea7-90e2-e932-c8129b6013c7@samba.org

Ok, thanks! Maybe Jens should apear in the output of:

scripts/get_maintainer.pl fs/splice.c

> On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 5:56 AM Stefan Metzmacher <metze at samba.org> wrote:
>>
>> So we have two cases:
>>
>> 1. network -> socket -> splice -> pipe -> splice -> file -> storage
>>
>> 2. storage -> file -> splice -> pipe -> splice -> socket -> network
>>
>> With 1. I guess everything can work reliable [..]
>>
>> But with 2. there's a problem, as the pages from the file,
>> which are spliced into the pipe are still shared without
>> copy on write with the file(system).
> 
> Well, honestly, that's really the whole point of splice. It was
> designed to be a way to share the storage data without having to go
> through a copy.


>> I'm wondering if there's a possible way out of this, maybe triggered by a new
>> flag passed to splice.
> 
> Not really.
> 
> So basically, you cannot do "copy on write" on a page cache page,
> because that breaks sharing.
> 
> You *want* the sharing to break, but that's because you're violating
> what splice() was for, but think about all the cases where somebody is
> just using mmap() and expects to see the file changes.
> 
> You also aren't thinking of the case where the page is already mapped
> writably, and user processes may be changing the data at any time.

I do because we're using that in our tdb library, but I hoped there would be
a way out...

>> I looked through the code and noticed the existence of IOMAP_F_SHARED.
> 
> Yeah, no. That's a hacky filesystem thing. It's not even a flag in
> anything core like 'struct page', it's just entirely internal to the
> filesystem itself.

Ok, I guess it's used for shared blocks in the filesystems,
in order to support things like cow support in order to allow
snapshots, correct?

>> Is there any other way we could archive something like this?
> 
> I suspect you simply want to copy it at splice time, rather than push
> the page itself into the pipe as we do in copy_page_to_iter_pipe().
> 
> Because the whole point of zero-copy really is that zero copy. And the
> whole point of splice() was to *not* complicate the rest of the system
> over-much, while allowing special cases.
> 
> Linux is not the heap of bad ideas that is Hurd that does various
> versioning etc, and that made copy-on-write a first-class citizen
> because it uses the concept of "immutable mapped data" for reads and
> writes.

Ok, thanks very much for the detailed feedback!

> Now, I do see a couple of possible alternatives to "just create a stable copy".
> 
> For example, we very much have the notion of "confirm buffer data
> before copying". It's used for things like "I started the IO on the
> page, but the IO failed with an error, so even though I gave you a
> splice buffer, it turns out you can't use it".
> 
> And I do wonder if we could introduce a notion of "optimistic splice",
> where the splice works exactly the way it does now (you get a page
> reference), but the "confirm" phase could check whether something has
> changed in that mapping (using the file versioning or whatever - I'm
> hand-waving) and simply fail the confirm.
> 
> That would mean that the "splice to socket" part would fail in your
> chain, and you'd have to re-try it. But then the onus would be on
> *you* as a splicer, not on the rest of the system to fix up your
> special case.
> 
> That idea sounds fairly far out there, and complicated and maybe not
> usable. So I'm just throwing it out as a "let's try to think of
> alternative solutions".

That sounds complicated and still racy.

Any comment about the idea of having a preadv2() flag that
asks for a dma copy with something like async_memcpy() instead
of the default that ends up in copy_user_enhanced_fast_string()?
If that would be possible, a similar flag would also be possible
for splice() in order to dma copy the pages into the pipe.

metze