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Before io_uring there were many failed proposals for a general purpose, asynchronous interface to wrap blocking syscalls. One of these, "syslets", was literally

by wahern 7y ago

Before io_uring there were many failed proposals for a general purpose, asynchronous interface to wrap blocking syscalls. One of these, "syslets", was literally a mechanism for batching arbitrary syscalls: https://lwn.net/Articles/221887/ https://lwn.net/Articles/221887/ > Syslets are small, simple, lightweight programs (consisting of system-calls, 'atoms') that the kernel can execute autonomously (and, not the least, asynchronously), without having to exit back into user-space. .... > Syslets consist of 'syslet atoms', where each atom represents a single system-call. These atoms can be chained to each other: serially, in branches or in loops.

correct_horse 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. It's encouraging that something at least resembling what I came up with was considered.
anonymousDan 7y ago
Any thoughts on why they failed?
- wahern 7y ago
  I don't think the kernel complexity and maintenance burden was deemed worth the effort. But now 1) Spectre has made syscalls more expensive and 2) Linux has destroyed all the competition and so there's alot more pressure to add features for what effectively would only ever be used by niche use cases--you don't add io_uring to benefit the Node.js crowd, you add it for Amazon and Netflix and other consumers that have have no other avenues for optimization. To be fair, io_uring seems to be a pretty sane design. But, for example, for many years anything with a shared ring buffer between userspace and the kernel was suspect. Now there are several such interfaces. Overall tolerance has grown, especially on the part of Linus. The kernel is much larger, and Linus seems to have become much more deferential to subsystem maintainers as his ability to understand and opine on code has slipped beyond his grasp.
eternalban 7y ago
The user api: https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async-user-api-defs.patch https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async... User space memory mapping (naturally left to the user) seems to be the error prone bit here. search for "sys_umem" here: https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async-core-code.patch https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async... I understand that this is low level stuff for experienced developers, but this approach basically asks the programmer to play linker. Entirely doable but I wonder what it looks like at scale (LOC).

by wahern 7y ago

correct_horse 7y ago

Thanks for sharing. It's encouraging that something at least resembling what I came up with was considered.

anonymousDan 7y ago

Any thoughts on why they failed?

wahern 7y ago
I don't think the kernel complexity and maintenance burden was deemed worth the effort. But now 1) Spectre has made syscalls more expensive and 2) Linux has destroyed all the competition and so there's alot more pressure to add features for what effectively would only ever be used by niche use cases--you don't add io_uring to benefit the Node.js crowd, you add it for Amazon and Netflix and other consumers that have have no other avenues for optimization. To be fair, io_uring seems to be a pretty sane design. But, for example, for many years anything with a shared ring buffer between userspace and the kernel was suspect. Now there are several such interfaces. Overall tolerance has grown, especially on the part of Linus. The kernel is much larger, and Linus seems to have become much more deferential to subsystem maintainers as his ability to understand and opine on code has slipped beyond his grasp.

eternalban 7y ago

The user api: https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async-user-api-defs.patch https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async... User space memory mapping (naturally left to the user) seems to be the error prone bit here. search for "sys_umem" here: https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async-core-code.patch https://people.redhat.com/mingo/syslet-patches/patches/async... I understand that this is low level stuff for experienced developers, but this approach basically asks the programmer to play linker. Entirely doable but I wonder what it looks like at scale (LOC).