Re: [PATCH RFC 2/2] io_uring: add support for getdents

[Dominique Martinet]

Dominique Martinet wrote on Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 03:14:52PM +0900:
> > AFAICT, the io_uring code wouldn't need to do much more other than
> > punt to the work queue if it receives a -EAGAIN result. Otherwise
> > the what the filesystem returns doesn't need to change, and I don't
> > see that we need to change how the filldir callbacks work, either.
> > We just keep filling the user buffer until we either run out of
> > cached directory data or the user buffer is full.
> 
> [...] I'd like to confirm what the uring
> side needs to do before proceeding -- looking at the read/write path
> there seems to be a polling mechanism in place to tell uring when to
> look again, and I haven't looked at this part of the code yet to see
> what happens if no such polling is in place (does uring just retry
> periodically?)

Ok so this part can work out as you said, I hadn't understood what you
meant by "punt to the work queue" but that should work from my new
understanding of the ring; we can just return EAGAIN if the non-blocking
variant doesn't have immediate results and call the blocking variant
when we're called again without IO_URING_F_NONBLOCK in flags.
(So there's no need to try to add a form of polling, although that is
possible if we ever become able to do that; I'll just forget about this
and be happy this part is easy)


That just leaves deciding if a filesystem handles the blocking variant
or not; ideally if we can know early (prep time) we can even mark
REQ_F_FORCE_ASYNC in flags to skip the non-blocking call for filesystems
that don't handle that and we get the best of both worlds.

I've had a second look and I still don't see anything obvious though;
I'd rather avoid adding a new variant of iterate()/iterate_shared() --
we could use that as a chance to add a flag to struct file_operation
instead? e.g., something like mmap_supported_flags:
-----
diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index c85916e9f7db..2ebbf48ee18b 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -1761,7 +1761,7 @@ struct file_operations {
 	int (*iopoll)(struct kiocb *kiocb, struct io_comp_batch *,
 			unsigned int flags);
 	int (*iterate) (struct file *, struct dir_context *);
-	int (*iterate_shared) (struct file *, struct dir_context *);
+	unsigned long iterate_supported_flags;
 	__poll_t (*poll) (struct file *, struct poll_table_struct *);
 	long (*unlocked_ioctl) (struct file *, unsigned int, unsigned long);
 	long (*compat_ioctl) (struct file *, unsigned int, unsigned long);
@@ -1797,6 +1797,10 @@ struct file_operations {
 				unsigned int poll_flags);
 } __randomize_layout;
 
+/** iterate_supported_flags */
+#define ITERATE_SHARED 0x1
+#define ITERATE_NOWAIT 0x2
+
 struct inode_operations {
 	struct dentry * (*lookup) (struct inode *,struct dentry *, unsigned int);
 	const char * (*get_link) (struct dentry *, struct inode *, struct delayed_call *);
-----

and fix all usages of iterate_shared.

I guess at this rate it might make sense to rename mmap_supported_flags
to some more generic supported_flags instead?...

It's a bit more than I have signed up for, but I guess it's still
reasonable enough. I'll wait for feedback before doing it though; please
say if this sounds good to you and I'll send a v2 with such a flag, as
well as adding flags to dir_context as you had suggested.

Thanks,
-- 
Dominique Martinet | Asmadeus