Re: Is sendfile all that sexy?

[Felix von Leitner]

Thus spake Ingo Molnar ([e-mail]):
> > I don't know how Linux does it, but returning the first free file
> > descriptor can be implemented as O(1) operation.
> to put it more accurately: the requirement is to be able to open(), use
> and close() an unlimited number of file descriptors with O(1) overhead,
> under any allocation pattern, with only RAM limiting the number of files.
> Both of my proposals attempt to provide this. It's possible to open() O(1)
> but do a O(log(N)) close(), but that is of no practical value IMO.

I cheated.  I was only talking about open().
close() is of course more expensive then.

Other than that: where does the requirement come from?
Can't we just use a free list where we prepend closed fds and always use
the first one on open()?  That would even increase spatial locality and
be good for the CPU caches.

Felix