It doesn't make the splice itself necessarily nonblocking (because the
actual file descriptors that are spliced from/to may block unless they
have the O_NONBLOCK flag set), but it makes the splice pipe operations
nonblocking.
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Woe be unto he who builds their filesystems as modules.
Signed-off-by: NJeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
[ Obscure quote from the infamous geek bible? ]
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

This enables the caller to migrate pages from one address space page
cache to another.  In buzz word marketing, you can do zero-copy file
copies!
Signed-off-by: NJens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

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: NJens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>