Re: [RFC PATCH] fuse: support splice() reading from fuse device

[Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>]

On Thu, 20 May 2010, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Are there actual real loads that get improved? I don't care if it means 
> that the improvement goes from three orders of magnitude to just a couple 
> of percent. The "couple of percent on actual loads" is a lot more 
> important than "many orders of magnitude on a made-up benchmark".

The reason I've been looking at zero copy for fuse is that embedded
people have been complaining about fuse's large CPU overhead for I/O.
So large in fact that it was having a performance impact even for
relatively slow devices.  And most of that overhead comes from copying
data around.

So it's not the 20GB/s throughput that's interesting but the reduced
CPU overhead, especially on slower processors.  Apart from cache
effects 20GB/s throughput with a null filesystem means 1% CPU at
200MB/s transfer speed with _any_ filesystem.  Without bigger requests
that translates to 4% overhead and without zero copy about 15%.
That's on a core2/1.8GHz, with an embedded CPU the overhead reduction
would be even more significant.

Miklos

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