Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] iov_iter: allow iov_iter_get_pages_alloc to allocate more pages per call

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 09:51:25AM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 08:32:03AM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > Small respin of the patch that I sent yesterday for the same thing.
> > 
> > This moves the maxsize handling into iov_iter_pvec_size, so that we don't
> > end up iterating past the max size we'll use anyway when trying to
> > determine the pagevec length.
> > 
> > Also, a respun patch to make ceph use iov_iter_get_pages_alloc instead of
> > trying to do it via its own routine.
> > 
> > Al, if these look ok, do you want to pick these up or shall I ask
> > Ilya to merge them via the ceph tree?
> 
> I'd rather have that kind of work go through the vfs tree; said that,
> I really wonder if this is the right approach.  Most of the users of
> iov_iter_get_pages()/iov_iter_get_pages_alloc() look like they want
> something like
> 	iov_iter_for_each_page(iter, size, f, data)
> with int (*f)(struct page *page, size_t from, size_t size, void *data)
> passed as callback.  Not everything fits that model, but there's a whole
> lot of things that do.

I was planning to do that, mostly because of the iomap dio code that
would not only get a lot cleaner with this, but also support multi-page
bvecs that we hope to have in the block layer soon.  The issue with it
is that we need to touch all the arch get_user_pages_fast
implementations, so it's going to be a relatively invasive change that I
didn't want to fix with just introducing the new direct I/O code.