On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 04:41:53AM +0530, Satyam Sharma wrote:
> [...]
>
> But where does the "send" come into the picture over here -- a send
> won't block forever, so I don't foresee any issues whatsoever w.r.t.
> kthreads conversion for that. [ BTW I hope you're *not* using any
> signals-based interface for your kernel thread _at all_. Kthreads
> disallow (ignore) all signals by default, as they should, and you really
> shouldn't need to write any logic to handle or do-certain-things-on-seeing
> a signal in a well designed kernel thread. ]
>
> >and the sending
> >latency is crucial to performance, while the recv
> >will not timeout for the next few seconds.
>
> Again, I don't see what sending latency has to do with a kernel_thread
> to kthread conversion. Or with signals, for that matter. Anyway, as
> Kyle Moffett mentioned elsewhere, you could probably look at other
> examples (say cifs_demultiplexer_thread() in fs/cifs/connect.c).
the basic problem, and what we use signals for, is:
it is waiting in recv, waiting for the peer to say something.
but I want it to stop recv, and go send something "right now".
I don't want to have two threads for that.
yes we have timeo in place, anyways: we need to detect a failed peer
node in time. we even aim for "sub-second failover" sometimes (which is
not exactly feasible; but failover times of 15 seconds and less are
requirement for useable HA-iSCSI deployments).
but that does not cut it, timeo is seconds.
you don't want seconds latency for IO operations.
so I signal it, it breaks out of recv, then sends, and goes back to recv.
in-kernel epoll would probably solve this.
I don't know how to do that properly, though.