fuse: support splice() writing to fuse device

Allow userspace filesystem implementation to use splice() to write to
the fuse device.  The semantics of using splice() are:

 1) buffer the message header and data in a temporary pipe
 2) with a *single* splice() call move the message from the temporary pipe
    to the fuse device

The READ reply message has the most interesting use for this, since
now the data from an arbitrary file descriptor (which could be a
regular file, a block device or a socket) can be tranferred into the
fuse device without having to go through a userspace buffer.  It will
also allow zero copy moving of pages.

One caveat is that the protocol on the fuse device requires the length
of the whole message to be written into the header.  But the length of
the data transferred into the temporary pipe may not be known in
advance.  The current library implementation works around this by
using vmplice to write the header and modifying the header after
splicing the data into the pipe (error handling omitted):

	struct fuse_out_header out;

	iov.iov_base = &out;
	iov.iov_len = sizeof(struct fuse_out_header);
	vmsplice(pip[1], &iov, 1, 0);
	len = splice(input_fd, input_offset, pip[1], NULL, len, 0);
	/* retrospectively modify the header: */
	out.len = len + sizeof(struct fuse_out_header);
	splice(pip[0], NULL, fuse_chan_fd(req->ch), NULL, out.len, flags);

This works since vmsplice only saves a pointer to the data, it does
not copy the data itself.

Since pipes are currently limited to 16 pages and messages need to be
spliced atomically, the length of the data is limited to 15 pages (or
60kB for 4k pages).

Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fuse.h b/include/linux/fuse.h
index 3e2925a34bf0..88e0eb596919 100644
--- a/include/linux/fuse.h
+++ b/include/linux/fuse.h
@@ -34,6 +34,9 @@
  * 7.13
  *  - make max number of background requests and congestion threshold
  *    tunables
+ *
+ * 7.14
+ *  - add splice support to fuse device
  */
 
 #ifndef _LINUX_FUSE_H
@@ -65,7 +68,7 @@
 #define FUSE_KERNEL_VERSION 7
 
 /** Minor version number of this interface */
-#define FUSE_KERNEL_MINOR_VERSION 13
+#define FUSE_KERNEL_MINOR_VERSION 14
 
 /** The node ID of the root inode */
 #define FUSE_ROOT_ID 1