In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Ben Mansell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On 14 Jan 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>> And no, I don't actually hink that sendfile() is all that hot. It was
>> _very_ easy to implement, and can be considered a 5-minute hack to give
>> a feature that fit very well in the MM architecture, and that the Apache
>> folks had already been using on other architectures.
>
>The current sendfile() has the limitation that it can't read data from
>a socket. Would it be another 5-minute hack to remove this limitation, so
>you could sendfile between sockets? Now _that_ would be sexy :)
I don't think that would be all that sexy at all.
You have to realize, that sendfile() is meant as an optimization, by
being able to re-use the same buffers that act as the in-kernel page
cache as buffers for sending data. So you avoid one copy.
However, for socket->socket, we would not have such an advantage. A
socket->socket sendfile() would not avoid any copies the way the
networking is done today. That _may_ change, of course. But it might
not. And I'd rather tell people using sendfile() that you get EINVAL if
it isn't able to optimize the transfer..
Linus
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