Re: Bug in short splice to socket?

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 9:09 AM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The reason the old code is garbage is that it sets SPLICE_F_MORE
> entirely in the wrong place. It sets it *after* it has done the
> splice(). That's just crazy.

Clarification, because there are two splice's (from and to): by "after
the splice" I mean after the splice source, of course. It's still set
before the splice _to_ the network.

(But it is still true that I hope the networking code itself then sets
MSG_MORE even if SPLICE_F_MORE wasn't set, if it gets a buffer that is
bigger than what it can handle right now - so there are two
*different* reasons for "more data" - either the source knows it has
more to give, or the destination knows it didn't use everything it
got).

The point is that the splice *source* knows whether there is more data
to be had, and that's where the "there is more" should be set.

But the generic code does *not* know. You add a completely horrendous
hack to kind of approximate that knowledge, but it's *wrong*.

The old code was wrong too, of course. No question about that.

Basically my argument is that the whole "there is more data" should be
set by "->splice_read()" not by some hack in some generic
splice_direct_to_actor() function that is absolutely not supposed to
know about the internals of the source or the destination.

Do we have a good interface for that? No. I get the feeling that to
actually fix this, we'd have to pass in the 'struct splice_desc"
pointer to ->splice_read().

Then the reading side can say "yup, I have more data for you after
this", and it all makes sense at least conceptually.

So please, can we just fix the layering violation, rather than make it worse?

                Linus