From cdd9dc31449cdbdce22ec33f26f99faa0527665e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Michael Stapelberg Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 20:46:47 +0100 Subject: [PATCH 1/1] docs/testsuite: explain how socket activation works in i3 --- docs/testsuite | 96 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 95 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/docs/testsuite b/docs/testsuite index b3b76c74..e067d33c 100644 --- a/docs/testsuite +++ b/docs/testsuite @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ i3 testsuite ============ Michael Stapelberg -September 2011 +October 2011 This document explains how the i3 testsuite works, how to use it and extend it. It is targeted at developers who not necessarily have been doing testing before @@ -449,3 +449,97 @@ request. You should use a random value in +data[1]+ and check that you received the same one when getting the reply. == Appendix B: Socket activation + +Socket activation is a mechanism which was made popular by systemd, an init +replacement. It basically describes creating a listening socket before starting +a program. systemd will invoke the program only when an actual connection to +the socket is made, hence the term socket activation. + +The interesting part of this (in the i3 context) is that you can very precisely +detect when the program is ready (finished its initialization). + +=== Preparing the listening socket + ++complete-run.pl+ will create a listening UNIX socket which it will then pass +to i3. This socket will be used by i3 as an additional IPC socket, just like +the one it will create on its own. Passing the socket happens implicitly +because children will inherit the parent’s sockets when fork()ing and sockets +will continue to exist after an exec() call (unless CLOEXEC is set of course). + +The only explicit things +complete-run.pl+ has to do is setting the +LISTEN_FDS+ +environment variable to the number of sockets which exist (1 in our case) and +setting the +LISTEN_PID+ environment variable to the current process ID. Both +variables are necessary so that the program (i3) knows how many sockets it +should use and if the environment variable is actually intended for it. i3 will +then start looking for sockets at file descriptor 3 (since 0, 1 and 2 are used +for stdin, stdout and stderr, respectively). + +The actual Perl code which sets up the socket, fork()s, makes sure the socket +has file descriptor 3 and sets up the environment variables follows (shortened +a bit): + + +.Setup socket and environment +----------------------------- +my $socket = IO::Socket::UNIX->new( + Listen => 1, + Local => $args{unix_socket_path}, +); + +my $pid = fork; +if ($pid == 0) { + $ENV{LISTEN_PID} = $$; + $ENV{LISTEN_FDS} = 1; + + # Only pass file descriptors 0 (stdin), 1 (stdout), + # 2 (stderr) and 3 (socket) to the child. + $^F = 3; + + # If the socket does not use file descriptor 3 by chance + # already, we close fd 3 and dup2() the socket to 3. + if (fileno($socket) != 3) { + POSIX::close(3); + POSIX::dup2(fileno($socket), 3); + } + + exec "/usr/bin/i3"; +} +----------------------------- + +=== Waiting for a reply + +In the parent process, we want to know when i3 is ready to answer our IPC +requests and handle our windows. Therefore, after forking, we immediately close +the listening socket (i3 will handle this side of the socket) and connect to it +(remember, we are talking about a named UNIX socket) as a client. This connect +call will immediately succeed because the kernel buffers it. Then, we send a +request (of type GET_TREE, but that is not really relevant). Writing data to +the socket will also succeed immediately because, again, the kernel buffers it +(only up to a certain amount of data of course). + +Afterwards, we just blockingly wait until we get an answer. In the child +process, i3 will setup the listening socket in its event loop. Immediately +after actually starting the event loop, it will notice a new client connecting +(the parent process) and handle its request. Since all initialization has been +completed successfully by the time the event loop is entered, we can now assume +that i3 is ready. + +=== Timing and conclusion + +A beautiful feature of this mechanism is that it does not depend on timing. It +does not matter when the child process gets CPU time or when the parent process +gets CPU time. On heavily loaded machines (or machines with multiple CPUs, +cores or unreliable schedulers), this makes waiting for i3 much more robust. + +Before using socket activation, we typically used a +sleep(1)+ and hoped that +i3 was initialized by that time. Of course, this breaks on some (slow) +computers and wastes a lot of time on faster computers. By using socket +activation, we decreased the total amount of time necessary to run all tests +(72 files at the time of writing) from > 100 seconds to 16 seconds. This makes +it significantly more attractive to run the test suite more often (or at all) +during development. + +An alternative approach to using socket activation is polling for the existance +of the IPC socket and connecting to it. While this might be slightly easier to +implement, it wastes CPU time and is considerably more ugly than this solution +:). After all, +lib/SocketActivation.pm+ contains only 54 SLOC. -- 2.39.5