Re: [PLEASE-TESTME] Zerocopy networking patch, 2.4.0-1

[Ingo Molnar]

On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Stephen Landamore wrote:

> >> Sure.  But sendfile is not one of the fundamental UNIX operations...

> > Neither were eg. kernel-based semaphores. So what? Unix wasnt

> Ehh, that's not correct. HP-UX was the first to implement sendfile().

i dont think we disagree. What i was referring to was the 'original' Unix
idea, the 30 years old one, which did not include sendfile() :-) We never
claimed that sendfile() first came up in Linux [that would be a blatant
lie] - and the Linux API itself was indeed influenced by existing
sendfile()/copyfile() interfaces. (at the time Linus implemented
sendfile() there already existed several similar interfaces.)

> For the record, sendfile() exists because we (Zeus) asked HP for it.

good move :-) [honestly.]

> (So of course we agree that sendfile is important!)

:-) I think sendfile() should also have its logical extensions:
receivefile(). I dont know how the HPUX implementation works, but in
Linux, right now it's only possible to sendfile() from a file to a socket.
The logical extension of this is to allow socket->file IO and file->file,
socket->socket IO as well. (the later one could be interesting for things
like web proxies.)

	Ingo