| # Block Devices |
| |
| Fuchsia Block device drivers are, like other drivers on the system, implemented |
| as userspace services that are accessible via IPC. Programs using block devices |
| will have one or more handles to these underlying drivers. Similar to filesystem |
| clients, which may send “read” or “write” requests to servers by encoding these |
| requests within RPC messages, programs may act as clients to block devices, and |
| may transmit RPC messages to a “device host” (referred to as “devhost” within |
| Zircon). The devhost process then transforms these requests into |
| driver-understood “I/O transactions”, where they are actually transmitted to the |
| particular block device driver, and eventually to real hardware. |
| |
| Particular block device drivers (USB, AHCI / SATA, Ramdisk, GPT, etc) implement |
| the [`ZX_PROTOCOL_BLOCK_CORE` protocol](/zircon/system/public/zircon/device/block.h), |
| which allows clients to queue transactions and query the block device. |
| |
| ## Fast Block I/O |
| |
| Block device drivers are often responsible for taking large portions of memory, |
| and queueing requests to a particular device to either “read into” or “write |
| from” a portion of memory. Unfortunately, as a consequence of transmitting |
| messages of a limited size from an RPC protocol into an “I/O transaction”, |
| repeated copying of large buffers is often required to access block devices. |
| |
| To avoid this performance bottleneck, the block device drivers implement |
| another mechanism to transmit reads and writes: a fast, FIFO-based protocol |
| which acts on a shared VMO. Filesystems (or any other client wishing to |
| interact with a block device) can acquire FIFOs from a block device, register a |
| “transaction buffer”, and pass handles to VMOs to the block device. Instead of |
| transmitting “read” or “write” messages with large buffers, a client of this |
| protocol can instead send a fast, lightweight control message on a FIFO, |
| indicating that the block device driver should act directly on the |
| already-registered VMO. For example, when writing to a file, rather than |
| passing bytes over IPC primitives directly, and copying them to a new location |
| in the block device’s memory, a filesystem (representing the file as a VMO) |
| could simply send a small FIFO message indicating “write N bytes directly from |
| offset X of VMO Y to offset Z on a disk”. When combined with the “mmap” |
| memory-mapping tools, this provides a “zero-copy” pathway directly from client |
| programs to disk (or in the other direction) when accessing files. |
