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path: root/lib/kernel/src/raw_file_io.erl
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2017-11-30Reimplement efile_drv as a dirty NIFJohn Högberg
This improves the latency of file operations as dirty schedulers are a bit more eager to run jobs than async threads, and use a single global queue rather than per-thread queues, eliminating the risk of a job stalling behind a long-running job on the same thread while other async threads sit idle. There's no such thing as a free lunch though; the lowered latency comes at the cost of increased busy-waiting which may have an adverse effect on some applications. This behavior can be tweaked with the +sbwt flag, but unfortunately it affects all types of schedulers and not just dirty ones. We plan to add type-specific flags at a later stage. sendfile has been moved to inet_drv to lessen the effect of a nasty race; the cooperation between inet_drv and efile has never been airtight and the socket dying at the wrong time (Regardless of reason) could result in fd aliasing. Moving it to the inet driver makes it impossible to trigger this by closing the socket in the middle of a sendfile operation, while still allowing it to be aborted -- something that can't be done if it stays in the file driver. The race still occurs if the controlling process dies in the short window between dispatching the sendfile operation and the dup(2) call in the driver, but it's much less likely to happen now. A proper fix is in the works. -- Notable functional differences: * The use_threads option for file:sendfile/5 no longer has any effect. * The file-specific DTrace probes have been removed. The same effect can be achieved with normal tracing together with the nif__entry/nif__return probes to track scheduling. -- OTP-14256