multithreaded tcp echo server problem & flips

[Frank Mehnert]

On Wednesday 02 August 2006 12:51, Martin Pohlack wrote:
> Christian Helmuth wrote:
> > Hello David,
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 04:55:53AM -0700, David Silcott wrote:
> >> I've ported my multithreaded tcp server to L4 using
> >> flips but I am having some problems getting it to run
> >> properly. It is a quite a bit to explain so I've
> >> written a simple tcp echoserver to demonstrate my
> >> problem.
> >
> > Ouch, already at this point I remember some limitations of the FLIPS
> > experiment and L4VFS. FLIPS supports concurrent blocking RPCs, e.g.
> > send() and recv(), only for calls using different L4VFS connections, see
> > l4vfs_init_connection(). If one uses the same connection for two blocking
> > calls the latter one is blocked in the underlying IPC in the microkernel.
> >
> > L4VFS currently implements no extensive multi-threading support and
> > therefore initializes only one connection to FLIPS per task, see
> > l4/pkg/l4vfs/lib/libc_backends/socket_io/socket.c line 44 ff.
>
> L4VFS *does* support multithreading applications, for example with the
> term server.  Therefore many functions in the IDL interfaces have this
> [allow_reply_only] flag set which basically allows the server to not
> answer calls directly but delayed with the help of a worker thread.  In
> between the session thread in the server is ready to receive new calls.

A small note: It is true that the answer can be delayed by the server,
however, the genereated code for L4v2 clients generated by the current
DICE implementation uses l4_ipc_call on the client side. Therefore the
very same thread which received the request has to reply (as long as
"send-as" is not implemented).

Frank
-- 
## Dept. of Computer Science, Dresden University of Technology, Germany ##
## http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~fm3                                     ##
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