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Brad Fitzpatrick

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"Generic AIO by scheduling stacks" [Jan. 30th, 2007|02:55 pm]
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Zach Brown just posted to lkml (a few minutes ago) ...

[PATCH 0 of 4] Generic AIO by scheduling stacks

It's a syscall to submit syscalls to run async. Then another syscall to async gather the results of the submitted syscalls as they complete. One of the most wonderful things I've seen in awhile! Any syscall!

And I'm especially happy that Linus loves it, so we should expect to see it sooner than later in real kernels.

Yay!
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Comments:
[User Picture]From: [info]midendian
2007-01-31 12:08 am (UTC)

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yay
[User Picture]From: [info]hawk
2007-01-31 01:15 am (UTC)

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Zach Brown from Aloha? He's back in Portland, yeah? I need to have a beer with that man...
[User Picture]From: [info]brad
2007-01-31 01:55 am (UTC)

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Not sure if he's from Aloha... the name doesn't ring a bell as somebody I knew.
[User Picture]From: [info]hawk
2007-01-31 11:58 pm (UTC)

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Yup. Same guy. He was a year ahead of me. Vanished off to Canada for a while, got married, and now I believe they live in Portland. I see him now and again, far less often than I'd like. If you haven't met him I should try to introduce you over the holidays. Or introduce yourself, for that matter. He's a great guy, very chill, and obviously a solid geek. His father is also sort of famous.
[User Picture]From: [info]dossy
2007-01-31 01:57 am (UTC)

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Kernel-space threading?

"Fibrils"? Didn't the Windows folks call these "fibers"?

As Linus said--the design is obvious, but the odds of a correct implementation are low. Threads are hard to get right. Userland AIO via kernel threads is great in principle, but I'll be surprised to see it done right in practice.

Still, I'd rather a relatively clued kernel hacker try to write the code than your J. Average Codemonkey try to do it in userspace with pthreads.
[User Picture]From: [info]eqe
2007-01-31 03:24 am (UTC)

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Zach makes my brane explode.
From: [info]paul.querna.org
2007-01-31 05:54 am (UTC)

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Dude. This freaking hot. Hot hot hot hot hot!

It makes me want to start on httpd 3.0... async everything. mmmmm.