Proper handling of context data in libaio callbacks?

Question

I'm working with kernel-level async I/O (i.e. libaio.h). Prior to submitting a struct iocb using io_submit I set the callback using io_set_callback that sticks a function pointer in iocb->data. Finally, I get the completed events using io_getevents and run each callback.

I'd like to be able to use some context information within the callback (e.g. a submission timestamp). The only method by which I can think of doing this is to continue using io_getevents, but have iocb->data point to a struct with context and the callback.

Is there any other methods for doing something like this, and is iocb->data guaranteed to be untouched when using io_getevents? My understanding is that there is another method by which libaio will automatically run callbacks which would be an issue if iocb->data wasn't pointing to a function.

Any clarification here would be nice. The documentation on libaio seems to really be lacking.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 23 '12 at 07:50

One solution, which I would imagine is typical, is to "derive" from iocb, and then cast the pointer you get back from io_getevents() to your struct. Something like this:

struct my_iocb {
    iocb cb;
    void* userdata;
    // ... anything else
};

When you issue your jobs, whether you do it one at a time or in a batch, you provide an array of pointers to iocb structs, which means they may point to my_iocb as well.

When you retrieve the notifications back from io_getevents(), you simply cast the io_event::obj pointer to your own type:

io_event events[512];
int num_events = io_getevents(ioctx, 1, 512, events, NULL);
for (int i = 0; i < num_events; ++i) {
   my_iocb* job = (my_iocb*)events[i].obj;
   // .. do stuff with job
}

If you don't want to block in io_getevents, but instead be notified via a file descriptor (so that you can block in select() or epoll(), which might be more convenient), I would recommend using the (undocumented) eventfd integration.

You can tie an aiocb to an eventfd file descriptor with io_set_eventfd(iocb* cb, int fd). Whenever the job completes, it increments the eventfd by one.

Note, if you use this mechanism, it is very important to never read more jobs from the io context (with io_getevents()) than what the eventfd counter said there were, otherwise you introduce a race condition from when you read the eventfd counter and reap the jobs.

Yup! Hobbled together something like this last night. Your answer definitely fills in some gaps that are lacking from the man pages! — Noah Watkins, Mar 23 '12 at 15:31

Proper handling of context data in libaio callbacks?

1 Answers1