Re: Way to check whether a particular block is on the shared_buffer?

KaiGai-san,

On 2016/02/01 10:38, Kouhei Kaigai wrote:
> As an aside, background of my motivation is the slide below:
> http://www.slideshare.net/kaigai/sqlgpussd-english
> (LT slides in JPUG conference last Dec)
>
> I'm under investigation of SSD-to-GPU direct feature on top of
> the custom-scan interface. It intends to load a bunch of data
> blocks on NVMe-SSD to GPU RAM using P2P DMA, prior to the data
> loading onto CPU/RAM, to preprocess the data to be filtered out.
> It only makes sense if the target blocks are not loaded to the
> CPU/RAM yet, because SSD device is essentially slower than RAM.
> So, I like to have a reliable way to check the latest status of
> the shared buffer, to kwon whether a particular block is already
> loaded or not.

Quite interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!

I'm in no way expert on this but could this generally be attacked from the
smgr API perspective? Currently, we have only one implementation - md.c
(the hard-coded RelationData.smgr_which = 0). If we extended that and
provided end-to-end support so that there would be md.c alternatives to
storage operations, I guess that would open up opportunities for
extensions to specify smgr_which as an argument to ReadBufferExtended(),
provided there is already support in place to install md.c alternatives
(perhaps in .so). Of course, these are just musings and, perhaps does not
really concern the requirements of custom scan methods you have been
developing.

Thanks,
Amit