On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 5:23 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakan...@vmware.com> wrote: > On 05/29/2014 04:12 PM, John Lumby wrote: >> >> Thanks for looking at it! >> >>> Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 00:19:33 +0300 >>> From: hlinnakan...@vmware.com >>> To: johnlu...@hotmail.com; pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org >>> CC: klaussfre...@gmail.com >>> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Extended Prefetching using Asynchronous IO - >>> proposal and patch >>> >>> On 05/28/2014 11:52 PM, John Lumby wrote: >>>> >>>> >>> >>> The patch seems to assume that you can put the aiocb struct in shared >>> memory, initiate an asynchronous I/O request from one process, and wait >>> for its completion from another process. I'm pretty surprised if that >>> works on any platform. >> >> >> It works on linux. Actually this ability allows the asyncio >> implementation to >> reduce complexity in one respect (yes I know it looks complex enough) : >> it makes waiting for completion of an in-progress IO simpler than for >> the existing synchronous IO case,. since librt takes care of the >> waiting. >> specifically, no need for extra wait-for-io control blocks >> such as in bufmgr's WaitIO() > > > [checks]. No, it doesn't work. See attached test program. > > It kinda seems to work sometimes, because of the way it's implemented in > glibc. The aiocb struct has a field for the result value and errno, and when > the I/O is finished, the worker thread fills them in. aio_error() and > aio_return() just return the values of those fields, so calling aio_error() > or aio_return() do in fact happen to work from a different process. > aio_suspend(), however, is implemented by sleeping on a process-local mutex, > which does not work from a different process. > > Even if it worked on Linux today, it would be a bad idea to rely on it from > a portability point of view. No, the only sane way to make this work is that > the process that initiates an I/O request is responsible for completing it. > If another process needs to wait for an async I/O to complete, we must use > some other means to do the waiting. Like the io_in_progress_lock that we > already have, for the same purpose.
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But calls to it are timeouted by 10us, effectively turning the thing into polling mode. Which is odd now that I read carefully, is how come 256 waits of 10us amounts to anything? That's just 2.5ms, not enough IIUC for any normal I/O to complete. -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
