signal/timer/event: KAIO eventfd support example

This is an example about how to add eventfd support to the current KAIO code,
in order to enable KAIO to post readiness events to a pollable fd (hence
compatible with POSIX select/poll).  The KAIO code simply signals the eventfd
fd when events are ready, and this triggers a POLLIN in the fd.  This patch
uses a reserved for future use member of the struct iocb to pass an eventfd
file descriptor, that KAIO will use to post events every time a request
completes.  At that point, an aio_getevents() will return the completed result
to a struct io_event.  I made a quick test program to verify the patch, and it
runs fine here:

http://www.xmailserver.org/eventfd-aio-test.c

The test program uses poll(2), but it'd, of course, work with select and epoll
too.

This can allow to schedule both block I/O and other poll-able devices
requests, and wait for results using select/poll/epoll.  In a typical
scenario, an application would submit KAIO request using aio_submit(), and
will also use epoll_ctl() on the whole other class of devices (that with the
addition of signals, timers and user events, now it's pretty much complete),
and then would:

	epoll_wait(...);
	for_each_event {
		if (curr_event_is_kaiofd) {
			aio_getevents();
			dispatch_aio_events();
		} else {
			dispatch_epoll_event();
		}
	}

Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/aio.h b/include/linux/aio.h
index 43dc2ebfaa0e..b903fc02bdb7 100644
--- a/include/linux/aio.h
+++ b/include/linux/aio.h
@@ -119,6 +119,12 @@ struct kiocb {
 
         struct list_head        ki_list;        /* the aio core uses this
                                                  * for cancellation */
+
+        /*
+         * If the aio_resfd field of the userspace iocb is not zero,
+         * this is the underlying file* to deliver event to.
+         */
+        struct file             *ki_eventfd;
 };
 
 #define is_sync_kiocb(iocb)     ((iocb)->ki_key == KIOCB_SYNC_KEY)