rking co-operatively if the pipe is not drained then you block. Which requires some wrapping to do non blocking on the send side or polling on the receive. In all to all communication it requires ordering otherwise you can deadlock. And in the example of many MPI tasks writing to one MPI task vmsplice serialises the copying. There are some cases of MPI collectives where even a single copy interface does not get us the performance gain we could. For example in an MPI_Reduce rather than copy the data from the source we would like to instead use it directly in a mathops (say the reduce is doing a sum) as this would save us doing a copy. We don't need to keep a copy of the data from the source. I haven't implemented this, but I think this interface could in the future do all this through the use of the flags - eg could specify the math operation and type and the kernel rather than just copying the data would apply the specified operation between the source and destination and store it in the destination. Although we don't have a "second user" of the interface (though I've had some nibbles from people who may be interested in using it for intra process messaging which is not MPI). This interface is something which hardware vendors are already doing for their custom drivers to implement fast local communication. And so in addition to this being useful for OpenMPI it would mean the driver maintainers don't have to fix things up when the mm changes. There was some discussion about how much faster a true zero copy would go. Here's a link back to the email with some testing I did on that: http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=130105930902915&w=2 There is a basic man page for the proposed interface here: http://ozlabs.org/~cyeoh/cma/process_vm_readv.txt This has been implemented for x86 and powerpc, other architecture should mainly (I think) just need to add syscall numbers for the process_vm_readv and process_vm_writev. There are 32 bit compatibility versions for 64-bit kernels. For arch maintainers there are some simple tests to be able to quickly verify that the syscalls are working correctly here: http://ozlabs.org/~cyeoh/cma/cma-test-20110718.tgz Signed-off-by: Chris Yeoh Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: Arnd Bergmann Cc: Paul Mackerras Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: David Howells Cc: James Morris Cc: Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds