Re: [PATCH] /dev/zero: also implement ->read

From: gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun Sep 06 2020 - 16:09:18 EST


On Sun, Sep 06, 2020 at 08:38:20PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> On Sun 2020-09-06 20:35:38, Christophe Leroy wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Le 06/09/2020 à 20:21, Pavel Machek a écrit :
> > >Hi!
> > >
> > >>>>Christophe reported a major speedup due to avoiding the iov_iter
> > >>>>overhead, so just add this trivial function. Note that /dev/zero
> > >>>>already implements both an iter and non-iter writes so this just
> > >>>>makes it more symmetric.
> > >>>>
> > >>>>Christophe Leroy <christophe.leroy@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > >>>>Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx>
> > >>>
> > >>>Tested-by: Christophe Leroy <christophe.leroy@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > >>
> > >>Any idea what has happened to make the 'iter' version so bad?
> > >
> > >Exactly. Also it would be nice to note how the speedup was measured
> > >and what the speedup is.
> > >
> >
> > Was measured on an 8xx powerpc running at 132MHz with:
> >
> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=1M
> >
> > With the patch, dd displays a throughput of 113.5MB/s
> > Without the patch it is 99.9MB/s
>
> Actually... that does not seem like a huge deal. read(/dev/zero) is
> not that common operation.

There is nothing wrong with this patch (aside from the sparse warning),
and it's in my tree now, so I don't understand complaining about it...

greg k-h