Rusty's Bleeding Edge Page

Anthony Liguori pointed out that one performance bottleneck for kvm (and lguest, if we cared) is the fact that the tap device doesn't support AIO.

Of course I said, AIO is evil because it's incompatible with poll(), to which he replied "eventfd". This was a introduced in 2.6.21 and AFAICT is best documented in the commit message. Two patches later Davide slipped in AIO support so AIO requests can hit the eventfd.

So now I want to use the thing, and I track down libaio: shipped by Ubuntu, SuSE and RedHat, and referred to by the io_submit(2) man page. Unfortunately, it's out-of-date: looks no eventfd support. In fact, at I can't find any version beyond 0.3.92 (Ubuntu claims 0.3.106) from 2002: looks pretty unloved.

Ok, let's update the header, and then I decide to run the test suite to make sure I've not broken anything. The test suite doesn't compile; maybe it did with older gccs and glibcs, but not any more. Hack it for the moment and run the tests.

Wade through the errors. Find two kernel bugs, create patches and send them off (corner cases, yes, but this is a bad sign). Find a couple of errors in the testsuite. Fix up the Makefile with a "make check" to do all the stuff the README says to do manually. Three or four hours later, send off patch.

Ben LaHaise hasn't responded directly, don't know if he's still interested in maintaining libaio (he indicated he's going to handover the kernel side). So for posterity (and others searching for preadv/pwritev or eventfd support for libio): here's my patch.

[Update: Jeff Moyer is keeping a repo with updates:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@rhlinux.redhat.com:/usr/local/CVS login # no password
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@rhlinux.redhat.com:/usr/local/CVS co libaio
Currently this is on the branch jmoyer-work-branch]

Now, what was it that I supposed to be doing?

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