This adds support for the sys_splice system call. Using a pipe as a
transport, it can connect to files or sockets (latter as output only).
From the splice.c comments:
"splice": joining two ropes together by interweaving their strands.
This is the "extended pipe" functionality, where a pipe is used as
an arbitrary in-memory buffer. Think of a pipe as a small kernel
buffer that you can use to transfer data from one end to the other.
The traditional unix read/write is extended with a "splice()" operation
that transfers data buffers to or from a pipe buffer.
Named by Larry McVoy, original implementation from Linus, extended by
Jens to support splicing to files and fixing the initial implementation
bugs.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
5274f052e7