Provided by: freebsd-manpages_11.1-3_all 
NAME
sendfile — send a file to a socket
LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <sys/uio.h>
int
sendfile(int fd, int s, off_t offset, size_t nbytes, struct sf_hdtr *hdtr, off_t *sbytes,
int flags);
DESCRIPTION
The sendfile() system call sends a regular file or shared memory object specified by
descriptor fd out a stream socket specified by descriptor s.
The offset argument specifies where to begin in the file. Should offset fall beyond the end
of file, the system will return success and report 0 bytes sent as described below. The
nbytes argument specifies how many bytes of the file should be sent, with 0 having the
special meaning of send until the end of file has been reached.
An optional header and/or trailer can be sent before and after the file data by specifying a
pointer to a struct sf_hdtr, which has the following structure:
struct sf_hdtr {
struct iovec *headers; /* pointer to header iovecs */
int hdr_cnt; /* number of header iovecs */
struct iovec *trailers; /* pointer to trailer iovecs */
int trl_cnt; /* number of trailer iovecs */
};
The headers and trailers pointers, if non-NULL, point to arrays of struct iovec structures.
See the writev() system call for information on the iovec structure. The number of iovecs
in these arrays is specified by hdr_cnt and trl_cnt.
If non-NULL, the system will write the total number of bytes sent on the socket to the
variable pointed to by sbytes.
The least significant 16 bits of flags argument is a bitmap of these values:
SF_NODISKIO
This flag causes sendfile to return EBUSY instead of blocking when a busy page
is encountered. This rare situation can happen if some other process is now
working with the same region of the file. It is advised to retry the
operation after a short period.
Note that in older FreeBSD versions the SF_NODISKIO had slightly different
notion. The flag prevented sendfile to run I/O operations in case if an
invalid (not cached) page is encountered, thus avoiding blocking on I/O.
Starting with FreeBSD 11 sendfile sending files off the ffs(7) filesystem
doesn't block on I/O (see IMPLEMENTATION NOTES ), so the condition no longer
applies. However, it is safe if an application utilizes SF_NODISKIO and on
EBUSY performs the same action as it did in older FreeBSD versions, e.g.
aio_read(2,) read(2) or sendfile in a different context.
SF_NOCACHE
The data sent to socket will not be cached by the virtual memory system, and
will be freed directly to the pool of free pages.
SF_SYNC
sendfile sleeps until the network stack no longer references the VM pages of
the file, making subsequent modifications to it safe. Please note that this
is not a guarantee that the data has actually been sent.
The most significant 16 bits of flags specify amount of pages that sendfile may read ahead
when reading the file. A macro SF_FLAGS() is provided to combine readahead amount and
flags. Example shows specifing readahead of 16 pages and SF_NOCACHE flag:
SF_FLAGS(16, SF_NOCACHE)
When using a socket marked for non-blocking I/O, sendfile() may send fewer bytes than
requested. In this case, the number of bytes successfully written is returned in *sbytes
(if specified), and the error EAGAIN is returned.
IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
The FreeBSD implementation of sendfile() doesn't block on disk I/O when it sends a file off
the ffs(7) filesystem. The syscall returns success before the actual I/O completes, and
data is put into the socket later unattended. However, the order of data in the socket is
preserved, so it is safe to do further writes to the socket.
The FreeBSD implementation of sendfile() is "zero-copy", meaning that it has been optimized
so that copying of the file data is avoided.
TUNING
On some architectures, this system call internally uses a special sendfile() buffer (struct
sf_buf) to handle sending file data to the client. If the sending socket is blocking, and
there are not enough sendfile() buffers available, sendfile() will block and report a state
of “sfbufa”. If the sending socket is non-blocking and there are not enough sendfile()
buffers available, the call will block and wait for the necessary buffers to become
available before finishing the call.
The number of sf_buf's allocated should be proportional to the number of nmbclusters used to
send data to a client via sendfile(). Tune accordingly to avoid blocking! Busy
installations that make extensive use of sendfile() may want to increase these values to be
inline with their kern.ipc.nmbclusters (see tuning(7) for details).
The number of sendfile() buffers available is determined at boot time by either the
kern.ipc.nsfbufs loader.conf(5) variable or the NSFBUFS kernel configuration tunable. The
number of sendfile() buffers scales with kern.maxusers. The kern.ipc.nsfbufsused and
kern.ipc.nsfbufspeak read-only sysctl(8) variables show current and peak sendfile() buffers
usage respectively. These values may also be viewed through netstat -m.
If a value of zero is reported for kern.ipc.nsfbufs, your architecture does not need to use
sendfile() buffers because their task can be efficiently performed by the generic virtual
memory structures.
RETURN VALUES
The sendfile() function returns the value 0 if successful; otherwise the value -1 is
returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
[EAGAIN] The socket is marked for non-blocking I/O and not all data was sent due
to the socket buffer being filled. If specified, the number of bytes
successfully sent will be returned in *sbytes.
[EBADF] The fd argument is not a valid file descriptor.
[EBADF] The s argument is not a valid socket descriptor.
[EBUSY] A busy page was encountered and SF_NODISKIO had been specified. Partial
data may have been sent.
[EFAULT] An invalid address was specified for an argument.
[EINTR] A signal interrupted sendfile() before it could be completed. If
specified, the number of bytes successfully sent will be returned in
*sbytes.
[EINVAL] The fd argument is not a regular file.
[EINVAL] The s argument is not a SOCK_STREAM type socket.
[EINVAL] The offset argument is negative.
[EIO] An error occurred while reading from fd.
[ENOBUFS] The system was unable to allocate an internal buffer.
[ENOTCONN] The s argument points to an unconnected socket.
[ENOTSOCK] The s argument is not a socket.
[EOPNOTSUPP] The file system for descriptor fd does not support sendfile().
[EPIPE] The socket peer has closed the connection.
SEE ALSO
netstat(1), open(2), send(2), socket(2), writev(2), tuning(7)
K. Elmeleegy, A. Chanda, A. L. Cox, and W. Zwaenepoel, “A Portable Kernel Abstraction for
Low-Overhead Ephemeral Mapping Management”, The Proceedings of the 2005 USENIX Annual
Technical Conference, pp 223-236, 2005.
HISTORY
The sendfile() system call first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0. This manual page first appeared
in FreeBSD 3.1. In FreeBSD 10 support for sending shared memory descriptors had been
introduced. In FreeBSD 11 a non-blocking implementation had been introduced.
AUTHORS
The initial implementation of sendfile() system call and this manual page were written by
David G. Lawrence <dg@dglawrence.com>. The FreeBSD 11 implementation was written by
Gleb Smirnoff <glebius@FreeBSD.org>.