If a server process has tons of pending socket connections, generally
it uses epoll to wait for activity. When the socket is ready for reading
(or writing), the task can select a buffer and issue a recv/send on the
given fd.
Now that we have fast (non-async thread) support, a task can have tons
of pending reads or writes pending. But that means they need buffers to
back that data, and if the number of connections is high enough, having
them preallocated for all possible connections is unfeasible.
With IORING_OP_PROVIDE_BUFFERS, an application can register buffers to
use for any request. The request then sets IOSQE_BUFFER_SELECT in the
sqe, and a given group ID in sqe->buf_group. When the fd becomes ready,
a free buffer from the specified group is selected. If none are
available, the request is terminated with -ENOBUFS. If successful, the
CQE on completion will contain the buffer ID chosen in the cqe->flags
member, encoded as:
(buffer_id << IORING_CQE_BUFFER_SHIFT) | IORING_CQE_F_BUFFER;
Once a buffer has been consumed by a request, it is no longer available
and must be registered again with IORING_OP_PROVIDE_BUFFERS.
Requests need to support this feature. For now, IORING_OP_READ and
IORING_OP_RECV support it. This is checked on SQE submission, a CQE with
res == -EOPNOTSUPP will be posted if attempted on unsupported requests.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
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