Matt Dillon committed the MSFBUF API. His commit note sums it up nicely so I’ll repaste:

” Add the MSFBUF API. MSFBUFs are like SFBUFs but they manage ephermal multi-page mappings instead of single-page mappings. MSFBUFs have the same caching and page invalidation optimizations that SFBUFs have and are considered to be SMP-friendly.

Whereas XIO manages pure page lists, MSFBUFs manage KVA mappings of pure page lists.

This initial commit just gets the basic API operational. The roadmap for future work includes things like better interactions with third-party XIOs, mapping user buffers into the kernel (extending the xio_init_ubuf() API into the MSFBUF API), and allowing higher level subsystems to pass previously released MSFBUFs as a hint to speed-up regeneration. We also need to come up with a way to overload additional sets of MSFBUFs representing smaller chunks of memory on top of the same KVA space in order to efficiently use our KVA reservation when dealing with subsystems like the buffer cache.

MSFBUFs will eventually replace the KVA management in the BUF/BIO, PIPE, and other subsystems which create fake linear mappings with pbufs. The general idea for BUF/BIO will be to use XIO and MSFBUFs to avoid KVA mapping file data through the nominal I/O path. XIO will be the primary I/O buffer mechanism while MSFBUFs will be used when things like UFS decide they need a temporary mapping.

This is a collaborative work between Hiten Pandya and Matthew Dillon .”