Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/935260/

Kernel support for copy offload is a feature that has been floating around
in limbo for a decade or more at this point; it has been implemented along
the way, but never merged. The idea is that the host
system can simply ask a block storage device to copy some data within the device
and it
will do so without further involving the host; instead of reading data into
the host so that it can be written back out again, the device circumvents
that process. At the
2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Nitesh Shetty led a storage and
filesystem session to discuss the current status of a patch set that he and
others have been working on, with an
eye toward getting something merged fairly soon.