Socket fs

[Emery Hemingway]

Hello Boris,

In my opinion, once you start using TCP/IP, you cross a complexity
threshold where it makes sense to use high-level langauges or
networking libraries.

The alternative would be to use the lwIP raw API and avoid libc, but
this is not exposed right now. Another option would be the Rust way, I
expect there is atleast Rust TCP stack in the works, so in theory a
Rust component could be crafted to use Nic sessions directly.


Cheers,
Emery


On Mon, 27 Mar 2017 13:25:43 +0200
Christian Helmuth <christian.helmuth at ...1...> wrote:

> Hello Boris,
> 
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 03:48:54PM +0100, Boris Mulder wrote:
> > 1. In the release notes you describe the support for async file I/O.
> > However, it seems that while asynchronous I/O works now,
> > synchronous I/O is no longer possible. When I remove the select()
> > call in the echo scenario, the call to recvfrom() will fail saying
> > the socket is not connected (even though it is an UDP socket and
> > should not have the notion of connections at all).
> > 
> > Of course this means it is not posix compatible; the intended
> > behaviour is to block until data becomes available.  
> 
> Thanks for your investigation. You're right the current state of
> socket support has some rough edges (esp. POSIX-correct error
> handling) that we plan to smoothen in near term. I'd like to invite
> you to open an issue at Github to aggregate your findings.
> 
> > 2. Currently there are two ways an application can use tcp/ip
> > sockets from the lxip stack: By using libc sockets, and by directly
> > opening a file system session and writing to the right socket
> > files. For any new Genode application that does not already depend
> > on libc, the first way means you unnecessarily add the entirety of
> > libc to your component. So the second way seems preferred. 
> > 
> > However, when programming an application using a file system
> > session directly adds a lot of code with many open()s, read()s and
> > write()s that could be abbreviated into single calls such as
> > connect() and recv(). Have you thought of providing a more
> > convenient API (such an object-oriented Socket class that hides the
> > vfs calls from the application programmer)? Or do you consider
> > using the fs session interface to be better? If so, why?  
> 
> We do not plan to implement an abstraction layer or object-oriented
> Socket interface currently. The mere reason for our recent
> developments was to enable more POSIX network applications to run on
> Genode and to support those components to share one network stack.
> Also, we imagine to mount the socket FS into Noux and use traditional
> tools in shell scripts to interoperate with the network.
> 
> I must admit that we (the Genode Labs team) do not assess ourselves as
> networking experts and, therefore, don't fancy to design and implement
> such a library. But as always nothing is set in stone and priorities
> may shift over time.
> 
> Regards