When is the kernel buffer cache empty? This does not seem to be LINE Buffering. If I write () a string without a newline character, it is immediately output to the file.
In addition, does the input and output buffers of the socket file also use the kernel buffer cache like Disk I / O? Also, does the input and output buffers of the kernel space used for read() and write() exist for each open file (fd)?
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main()
{
int fd = open("text", O_RDWR | O_CREAT);
write(fd, "message", strlen("message"));
// I can check the string in the file without fsync(fd).
sleep(30);
close(fd);
return 0;
}
When is page cache bypassed?
Page cache shall be bypassed using direct I/O, provided that
opened with O_DIRECT flag
certain offset/address alignment constraint is met
no extending writes performed
See this link for more information.
(I'm assuming Linux for the answers below)
When is the kernel buffer cache empty?
You would need more context for this to be answerable. Additionally as you seem to be making files in a filesystem I'll refer to the kernel cache being used as the page cache, see the "What is the major difference between the buffer cache and the page cache?" quora question for the difference. For example, a write can be in the kernel page cache but not have made its way to do disk (i.e. dirty) or it can be in BOTH the page cache AND on disk (i.e. it got written out but the kernel is choosing to hold on to it in RAM). Do you mean "made clean" or do you mean "entirely discarded from the page cache"? Or do you mean "when is the I/O done visible to other programs working on the same file"?
This does not seem to be LINE Buffering
At the C library level there's a difference between I/O done on streams (which can be line buffered) and low-level I/O done on file descriptors. Your example is using file descriptors so there would never be line buffering. Further, C library buffering is orthogonal to kernel buffering.
does the input and output buffers of the socket file also use the kernel buffer cache like Disk I / O?
Sockets don't use the page cache as they aren't block or file backed. However, socket I/O IS buffered using sk_buff in the kernel.
Also, does the input and output buffers of the kernel space used for read() and write() exist for each open file (fd)?
Sorry, I don't understand the question. The page cache is shared for files/block devices so multiple file descriptors to the same file will be serviced by the same entries in the page cache (assuming they are requesting identical offsets).
(ETOOMANYQUESTIONS! #andoryu please can you limit one question per post? It's tough going for someone trying to answer otherwise. Thanks!)
Related
I keep on reading that fread() and fwrite() are buffered library calls. In case of fwrite(), I understood that once we write to the file, it won't be written to the hard disk, it will fill the internal buffer and once the buffer is full, it will call write() system call to write the data actually to the file.
But I am not able to understand how this buffering works in case of fread(). Does buffered in case of fread() mean, once we call fread(), it will read more data than we originally asked and that extra data will be stored in buffer (so that when 2nd fread() occurs, it can directly give it from buffer instead of going to hard disk)?
And I have following queries also.
If fread() works as I mention above, then will first fread() call read the data that is equal to the size of the internal buffer? If that is the case, if my fread() call ask for more bytes than internal buffer size, what will happen?
If fread() works as I mention above, that means at least one read() system call to kernel will happen for sure in case of fread(). But in case of fwrite(), if we only call fwrite() once during the program execution, we can't say for sure that write() system call be called. Is my understanding correct?
Will the internal buffer be maintained by OS?
Does fclose() flush the internal buffer?
There is buffering or caching at many different levels in a modern system. This might be typical:
C standard library
OS kernel
disk controller (esp. if using hardware RAID)
disk drive
When you use fread(), it may request 8 KB or so if you asked for less. This will be stored in user-space so there is no system call and context switch on the next sequential read.
The kernel may read ahead also; there are library functions to give it hints on how to do this for your particular application. The OS cache could be gigabytes in size since it uses main memory.
The disk controller may read ahead too, and could have a cache size up to hundreds of megabytes on smallish systems. It can't do as much in terms of read-ahead, because it doesn't know where the next logical block is for the current file (indeed it doesn't even know what file it is reading).
Finally, the disk drive itself has a cache, perhaps 16 MB or so. Like the controller, it doesn't know what file it is reading. For many years one disk block was 512 bytes, but it got a little larger (a few KB) recently with multi-terabyte disks.
When you call fclose(), it will probably deallocate the user-space buffer, but not the others.
Your understanding is correct. And any buffered fwrite data will be flushed when the FILE* is closed. The buffered I/O is mostly transparent for I/O on regular files.
But for terminals and other character devices you may care. Another instance where buffered I/O may be an issue is if you read from the file that one process is writing to from another process -- a common example is if a program writes text to a log file during operation, and the user runs a command like tail -f program.log to watch the content of the log file live. If the writing process has buffering enabled and it doesn't explicitly flush the log file, it will make it difficult to monitor the log file.
Why would you want to set aside a block of memory in setvbuf()?
I have no clue why you would want to send your read/write stream to a buffer.
setvbuf is not intended to redirect the output to a buffer (if you want to perform IO on a buffer you use sprintf & co.), but to tightly control the buffering behavior of the given stream.
In facts, C IO functions don't immediately pass the data to be written to the operating system, but keep an intermediate buffer to avoid continuously performing (potentially expensive) system calls, waiting for the buffer to fill before actually performing the write.
The most basic case is to disable buffering altogether (useful e.g. if writing to a log file, where you want the data to go to disk immediately after each output operation) or, on the other hand, to enable block buffering on streams where it is disabled by default (or is set to line-buffering). This may be useful to enhance output performance.
Setting a specific buffer for output can be useful if you are working with a device that is known to work well with a specific buffer size; on the other side, you may want to have a small buffer to cut down on memory usage in memory-constrained environments, or to avoid losing much data in case of power loss without disabling buffering completely.
In C files opened with e.g. fopen are by default buffered. You can use setvbuf to supply your own buffer, or make the file operations completely unbuffered (like to stderr is).
It can be used to create fmemopen functionality on systems that doesn't have that function.
The size of a files buffer can affect Standard library call I/O rates. There is a table in Chap 5 of Steven's 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment' that shows I/O throughput increasing dramatically with I/O buffer size, up to ~16K then leveling off. A lot of other factor can influenc overall I/O throughtput, so this one "tuning" affect may or may not be a cureall. This is the main reason for "why" other than turning off/on buffering.
Each FILE structure has a buffer associated with it internally. The reason behind this is to reduce I/O, and real I/O operations are time costly.
All your read/write will be buffered until the buffer is full. All the data buffered will be output/input in one real I/O operation.
Why would you want to set aside a block of memory in setvbuf()?
For buffering.
I have no clue why you would want to send your read/write stream to a buffer.
Neither do I, but as that's not what it does the point is moot.
"The setvbuf() function may be used on any open stream to change its buffer" [my emphasis]. In other words it alread has a buffer, and all the function does is change that. It doesn't say anything about 'sending your read/write streams to a buffer". I suggest you read the man page to see what it actually says. Especially this part:
When an output stream is unbuffered, information appears on the destination file or terminal as soon as written; when it is block buffered many characters are saved up and written as a block; when it is line buffered characters are saved up until a newline is output or input is read from any stream attached to a terminal device (typically stdin).
Below is sample code for using fflush():
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <io.h>
void flush(FILE *stream);
int main(void)
{
FILE *stream;
char msg[] = "This is a test";
/* create a file */
stream = fopen("DUMMY.FIL", "w");
/* write some data to the file */
fwrite(msg, strlen(msg), 1, stream);
clrscr();
printf("Press any key to flush DUMMY.FIL:");
getch();
/* flush the data to DUMMY.FIL without closing it */
flush(stream);
printf("\nFile was flushed, Press any key to quit:");
getch();
return 0;
}
void flush(FILE *stream)
{
int duphandle;
/* flush the stream's internal buffer */
fflush(stream);
/* make a duplicate file handle */
duphandle = dup(fileno(stream));
/* close the duplicate handle to flush the DOS buffer */
close(duphandle);
}
All I know about fflush() is that it is a library function used to flush an output buffer. I want to know what is the basic purpose of using fflush(), and where can I use it. And mainly I am interested in knowing what problems can there be with using fflush().
It's a little hard to say what "can be problems with" (excessive?) use of fflush. All kinds of things can be, or become, problems, depending on your goals and approaches. Probably a better way to look at this is what the intent of fflush is.
The first thing to consider is that fflush is defined only on output streams. An output stream collects "things to write to a file" into a large(ish) buffer, and then writes that buffer to the file. The point of this collecting-up-and-writing-later is to improve speed/efficiency, in two ways:
On modern OSes, there's some penalty for crossing the user/kernel protection boundary (the system has to change some protection information in the CPU, etc). If you make a large number of OS-level write calls, you pay that penalty for each one. If you collect up, say, 8192 or so individual writes into one large buffer and then make one call, you remove most of that overhead.
On many modern OSes, each OS write call will try to optimize file performance in some way, e.g., by discovering that you've extended a short file to a longer one, and it would be good to move the disk block from point A on the disk to point B on the disk, so that the longer data can fit contiguously. (On older OSes, this is a separate "defragmentation" step you might run manually. You can think of this as the modern OS doing dynamic, instantaneous defragmentation.) If you were to write, say, 500 bytes, and then another 200, and then 700, and so on, it will do a lot of this work; but if you make one big call with, say, 8192 bytes, the OS can allocate a large block once, and put everything there and not have to re-defragment later.
So, the folks who provide your C library and its stdio stream implementation do whatever is appropriate on your OS to find a "reasonably optimal" block size, and to collect up all output into chunk of that size. (The numbers 4096, 8192, 16384, and 65536 often, today, tend to be good ones, but it really depends on the OS, and sometimes the underlying file system as well. Note that "bigger" is not always "better": streaming data in chunks of four gigabytes at a time will probably perform worse than doing it in chunks of 64 Kbytes, for instance.)
But this creates a problem. Suppose you're writing to a file, such as a log file with date-and-time stamps and messages, and your code is going to keep writing to that file later, but right now, it wants to suspend for a while and let a log-analyzer read the current contents of the log file. One option is to use fclose to close the log file, then fopen to open it again in order to append more data later. It's more efficient, though, to push any pending log messages to the underlying OS file, but keep the file open. That's what fflush does.
Buffering also creates another problem. Suppose your code has some bug, and it sometimes crashes but you're not sure if it's about to crash. And suppose you've written something and it's very important that this data get out to the underlying file system. You can call fflush to push the data through to the OS, before calling your potentially-bad code that might crash. (Sometimes this is good for debugging.)
Or, suppose you're on a Unix-like system, and have a fork system call. This call duplicates the entire user-space (makes a clone of the original process). The stdio buffers are in user space, so the clone has the same buffered-up-but-not-yet-written data that the original process had, at the time of the fork call. Here again, one way to solve the problem is to use fflush to push buffered data out just before doing the fork. If everything is out before the fork, there's nothing to duplicate; the fresh clone won't ever attempt to write the buffered-up data, as it no longer exists.
The more fflush-es you add, the more you're defeating the original idea of collecting up large chunks of data. That is, you are making a tradeoff: large chunks are more efficient, but are causing some other problem, so you make the decision: "be less efficient here, to solve a problem more important than mere efficiency". You call fflush.
Sometimes the problem is simply "debug the software". In that case, instead of repeatedly calling fflush, you can use functions like setbuf and setvbuf to alter the buffering behavior of a stdio stream. This is more convenient (fewer, or even no, code changes required—you can control the set-buffering call with a flag) than adding a lot of fflush calls, so that could be considered a "problem with use (or excessive-use) of fflush".
Well, #torek's answer is almost perfect, but there's one point which is not so accurate.
The first thing to consider is that fflush is defined only on output
streams.
According to man fflush, fflush can also be used in input streams:
For output streams, fflush() forces a write of all user-space
buffered data for the given output or update stream via the stream's
underlying write function. For
input streams, fflush() discards any buffered data that has been fetched from the underlying file, but has not been consumed by
the application. The open status of
the stream is unaffected.
So, when used in input, fflush just discard it.
Here is a demo to illustrate it:
#include<stdio.h>
#define MAXLINE 1024
int main(void) {
char buf[MAXLINE];
printf("prompt: ");
while (fgets(buf, MAXLINE, stdin) != NULL)
fflush(stdin);
if (fputs(buf, stdout) == EOF)
printf("output err");
exit(0);
}
fflush() empties the buffers related to the stream. if you e.g. let a user input some data in a very shot timespan (milliseconds) and write some stuff into a file, the writing and reading buffers may have some "reststuff" remaining in themselves. you call fflush() then to empty all the buffers and force standard outputs to be sure the next input you get is what the user pressed then.
reference: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/fflush/
I know that when you call fwrite or fprintf or rather any other function that writes to a file, the contents aren't immediately flushed to the disk, but buffered in the memory.
Firstly, where do the OS manage these buffers and how. Secondly, if you do the write to a file and later read in the content you wrote and assuming that the OS didn't flushed the contents between the time you wrote and read, how it knows that it has to return the read from the buffer? How does it handle this situation.
The reason I want to know this is that I'm interested in implementing my own buffering scheme in user-space, rather than kernel space as done by OS. That is, write to a file would be buffered in user-space and the actual write will only occur at a certain point. Consquently I also need to handle situations where read is called for the content that is still in the buffer. Is it possible to do all this in user-space.
Firstly, where do the OS manage these buffers and how
The functions fwrite and fprintf use stdio buffers which already are completely in userspace. The buffers are (likely) static arrays or perhaps malloced memory.
how it knows that it has to return the read from the buffer
It doesn't, so the changes aren't seen. Nothing actually happens to a file until the underlying system call (write) is called (and even then - read on).
Is it possible to do all this in user-space
No, it's not possible. The good news is that the kernel already has buffers so every write you do isn't atually translated into an actual write to the file. It is postponed and executed later. If in the meantime somebody tries to read from the file, the kernel is smart enough to serve him from the buffer.
Bits from TLPI:
When working with disk files, the read() and write() system calls
don’t directly ini- tiate disk access. Instead, they simply copy data
between a user-space buffer and a buffer in the kernel buffer cache.
When performing I/O on a disk file, a successful return from write()
doesn’t guarantee that the data has been transferred to disk, because
the kernel performs buffering of disk I/O in order to reduce disk
activity and expedite write() calls.
At some later point, the kernel writes (flushes) its buffer to the
disk.
If, in the interim, another process attempts to read these bytes of
the file, then the kernel automatically supplies the data from the
buffer cache, rather than from (the outdated contents of) the file.
So you may want to find out about sync and fsync.
Multiple levels of buffering are generally bad. The reason stdio buffers are useful is that they minimize the number of system calls performed. If a system call would be cheaper nobody would use stdio buffers anymore.
I'm going to first admit that this is for a class project, since it will be pretty obvious. We are supposed to do reads to probe for the block size of the filesystem. My problem is that the time taken to do this appears to be linearly increasing, with no steps like I would expect.
I am timing the read like this:
double startTime = getticks();
read = fread(x, 1, toRead, fp);
double endTime = getticks();
where getticks uses rdtsc instructions. I am afraid there is caching/prefetching that is causing the reads to not take time during the fread. I tried creating a random file between each execution my program, but that is not alleviating my problem.
What is the best way to accurately measure the time taken for a read from disk? I am pretty sure my block size is 4096, but how can I get data to support that?
The usual way of determining filesystem block size is to ask the filesystem what its blocksize is.
#include <sys/statvfs.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
struct statvfs fs_stat;
statvfs(".", &fs_stat);
printf("%lu\n", fs_stat.f_bsize);
}
But if you really want, open(…,…|O_DIRECT) or posix_fadvise(…,…,…,POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) will try to let you bypass the kernel's buffer cache (not guaranteed).
You may want to use the system calls (open(), read(), write(), ...)
directly to reduce the impact of the buffering done by the FILE* stuff.
Also, you may want to use synchronous I/O somehow.
One ways is opening the file with the O_SYNC flag set
(or O_DIRECT as per ephemient's reply).
Quoting the Linux open(2) manual page:
O_SYNC The file is opened for synchronous I/O. Any write(2)s on the
resulting file descriptor will block the calling process until
the data has been physically written to the underlying hardware.
But see NOTES below.
Another options would be mounting the filesystem with -o sync (see mount(8)) or setting the S attribute on the file using the chattr(1) command.