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The Art of Unix Programming
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Unix Programming - Taxonomy of Unix IPC Methods - Peer-to-Peer Inter-Process Communication

Peer-to-Peer Inter-Process Communication

All the communication methods we've discussed so far have a sort of implicit hierarchy about them, with one program effectively controlling or driving another and zero or limited feedback passing in the opposite direction. In communications and networking we frequently need channels that are peer-to-peer , usually (but not necessarily) with data flowing freely in both directions. We'll survey peer-to-peer communications methods under Unix here, and develop some case studies in later chapters.

The use of tempfiles as communications drops between cooperating programs is the oldest IPC technique there is. Despite drawbacks, it's still useful in shellscripts, and in one-off programs where a more elaborate and coordinated method of communication would be overkill.

The most obvious problem with using tempfiles as an IPC technique is that it tends to leave garbage lying around if processing is interrupted before the tempfile can be deleted. A less obvious risk is that of collisions between multiple instances of a program using the same name for a tempfile. This is why it is conventional for shellscripts that make tempfiles to include $$ in their names; this shell variable expands to the process-ID of the enclosing shell and effectively guarantees that the filename will be unique (the same trick is supported in Perl).

Finally, if an attacker knows the location to which a tempfile will be written, it can overwrite on that name and possibly either read the producer's data or spoof the consumer process by inserting modified or spurious data into the file.[74] This is a security risk. If the processes involved have root privileges, this is a very serious risk. It can be mitigated by setting the permissions on the tempfile directory carefully, but such arrangements are notoriously likely to spring leaks.

All these problems aside, tempfiles still have a niche because they're easy to set up, they're flexible, and they're less vulnerable to deadlocks or race conditions than more elaborate methods. And sometimes, nothing else will do. The calling conventions of your child process may require that it be handed a file to operate on. Our first example of a shellout to an editor demonstrates this perfectly.

The simplest and crudest way for two processes on the same machine to communicate with each other is for one to send the other a signal . Unix signals are a form of soft interrupt; each one has a default effect on the receiving process (usually to kill it). A process can declare a signal handler that overrides the default action for the signal; the handler is a function that is executed asynchronously when the signal is received.

Signals were originally designed into Unix as a way for the operating system to notify programs of certain errors and critical events, not as an IPC facility. The SIGHUP signal, for example, is sent to every program started from a given terminal session when that session is terminated. The SIGINT signal is sent to whatever process is currently attached to the keyboard when the user enters the currently-defined interrupt character (often control-C). Nevertheless, signals can be useful for some IPC situations (and the POSIX-standard signal set includes two signals, SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2, intended for this use). They are often employed as a control channel for daemons (programs that run constantly, invisibly, in background), a way for an operator or another program to tell a daemon that it needs to either reinitialize itself, wake up to do work, or write internal-state/debugging information to a known location.

I insisted SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 be invented for BSD. People were grabbing system signals to mean what they needed them to mean for IPC, so that (for example) some programs that segfaulted would not coredump because SIGSEGV had been hijacked.

This is a general principle — people will want to hijack any tools you build, so you have to design them to either be un-hijackable or to be hijacked cleanly. Those are your only choices. Except, of course, for being ignored—a highly reliable way to remain unsullied, but less satisfying than might at first appear.

-- Ken Arnold

A technique often used with signal IPC is the so-called pidfile . Programs that will need to be signaled will write a small file to a known location (often in /var/run or the invoking user's home directory) containing their process ID or PID. Other programs can read that file to discover that PID. The pidfile may also function as an implicit lock file in cases where no more than one instance of the daemon should be running simultaneously.

There are actually two different flavors of signals. In the older implementations (notably V7, System III, and early System V), the handler for a given signal is reset to the default for that signal whenever the handler fires. The result of sending two of the same signal in quick succession is therefore usually to kill the process, no matter what handler was set.

The BSD 4.x versions of Unix changed to “reliable” signals, which do not reset unless the user explicitly requests it. They also introduced primitives to block or temporarily suspend processing of a given set of signals. Modern Unixes support both styles. You should use the BSD-style nonresetting entry points for new code, but program defensively in case your code is ever ported to an implementation that does not support them.

Receiving N signals does not necessarily invoke the signal handler N times. Under the older System V signal model, two or more signals spaced very closely together (that is, within a single timeslice of the target process) can result in various race conditions[75] or anomalies. Depending on what variant of signals semantics the system supports, the second and later instances may be ignored, may cause an unexpected process kill, or may have their delivery delayed until earlier instances have been processed (on modern Unixes the last is most likely).

The modern signals API is portable across all recent Unix versions, but not to Windows or classic (pre-OS X) MacOS.

Sockets were developed in the BSD lineage of Unix as a way to encapsulate access to data networks. Two programs communicating over a socket typically see a bidirectional byte stream (there are other socket modes and transmission methods, but they are of only minor importance). The byte stream is both sequenced (that is, even single bytes will be received in the same order sent) and reliable (socket users are guaranteed that the underlying network will do error detection and retry to ensure delivery). Socket descriptors, once obtained, behave essentially like file descriptors.

Sockets differ from read/write in one important case. If the bytes you send arrive, but the receiving machine fails to ACK, the sending machine's TCP/IP stack will time out. So getting an error does not necessarily mean that the bytes didn't arrive; the receiver may be using them. This problem has profound consequences for the design of reliable protocols, because you have to be able to work properly when you don't know what was received in the past. Local I/O is ‘yes/no’. Socket I/O is ‘yes/no/maybe’. And nothing can ensure delivery — the remote machine might have been destroyed by a comet.

-- Ken Arnold

At the time a socket is created, you specify a protocol family which tells the network layer how the name of the socket is interpreted. Sockets are usually thought of in connection with the Internet, as a way of passing data between programs running on different hosts; this is the AF_INET socket family, in which addresses are interpreted as host-address and service-number pairs. However, the AF_UNIX (aka AF_LOCAL) protocol family supports the same socket abstraction for communication between two processes on the same machine (names are interpreted as the locations of special files analogous to bidirectional named pipes). As an example, client programs and servers using the X windowing system typically use AF_LOCAL sockets to communicate.

All modern Unixes support BSD-style sockets, and as a matter of design they are usually the right thing to use for bidirectional IPC no matter where your cooperating processes are located. Performance pressure may push you to use shared memory or tempfiles or other techniques that make stronger locality assumptions, but under modern conditions it is best to assume that your code will need to be scaled up to distributed operation. More importantly, those locality assumptions may mean that portions of your system get chummier with each others' internals than ought to be the case in a good design. The separation of address spaces that sockets enforce is a feature, not a bug.

To use sockets gracefully, in the Unix tradition, start by designing an application protocol for use between them — a set of requests and responses which expresses the semantics of what your programs will be communicating about in a succinct way. We've already discussed the some major issues in the design of application protocols in Chapter5.

Sockets are supported in all recent Unixes, under Windows, and under classic MacOS as well.

PostgreSQL is an open-source database program. Had it been implemented as a monster monolith, it would be a single program with an interactive interface that manipulates database files on disk directly. Interface would be welded together with implementation, and two instances of the program attempting to manipulate the same database at the same time would have serious contention and locking issues.

Instead, the PostgreSQL suite includes a server called postmaster and at least three client applications. One postmaster server process per machine runs in background and has exclusive access to the database files. It accepts requests in the SQL query minilanguage through TCP/IP sockets, and returns answers in a textual format as well. When the user runs a PostgreSQL client, that client opens a session to postmaster and does SQL transactions with it. The server can handle several client sessions at once, and sequences requests so that they don't interfere with each other.

Because the front end and back end are separate, the server doesn't need to know anything except how to interpret SQL requests from a client and send SQL reports back to it. The clients, on the other hand, don't need to know anything about how the database is stored. Clients can be specialized for different needs and have different user interfaces.

This organization is quite typical for Unix databases — so much so that it is often possible to mix and match SQL clients and SQL servers. The interoperability issues are the SQL server's TCP/IP port number, and whether client and server support the same dialect of SQL.

In Chapter6, we introduced Freeciv as an example of transparent data formats. But more critical to the way it supports multiplayer gaming is the client/server partitioning of the code. This is a representative example of a program in which the application needs to be distributed over a wide-area network and handles communication through TCP/IP sockets.

The state of a running Freeciv game is maintained by a server process, the game engine. Players run GUI clients which exchange information and commands with the server through a packet protocol. All game logic is handled in the server. The details of GUI are handled in the client; different clients support different interface styles.

This is a very typical organization for a multiplayer online game. The packet protocol uses TCP/IP as a transport, so one server can handle clients running on different Internet hosts. Other games that are more like real-time simulations (notably first-person shooters) use raw Internet datagram protocol (UDP) and trade lower latency for some uncertainty about whether any given packet will be delivered. In such games, users tend to be issuing control actions continuously, so sporadic dropouts are tolerable, but lag is fatal.

Whereas two processes using sockets to communicate may live on different machines (and, in fact, be separated by an Internet connection spanning half the globe), shared memory requires producers and consumers to be co-resident on the same hardware. But, if your communicating processes can get access to the same physical memory, shared memory will be the fastest way to pass information between them.

Shared memory may be disguised under different APIs, but on modern Unixes the implementation normally depends on the use of mmap(2) to map files into memory that can be shared between processes. POSIX defines a shm_open(3) facility with an API that supports using files as shared memory; this is mostly a hint to the operating system that it need not flush the pseudofile data to disk.

Because access to shared memory is not automatically serialized by a discipline resembling read and write calls, programs doing the sharing must handle contention and deadlock issues themselves, typically by using semaphore variables located in the shared segment. The issues here resemble those in multithreading (see the end of this chapter for discussion) but are more manageable because default is not to share memory. Thus, problems are better contained.

On systems where it is available and reliable, the Apache web server's scoreboard facility uses shared memory for communication between an Apache master process and the load-sharing pool of Apache images that it manages. Modern X implementations also use shared memory, to pass large images between client and server when they are resident on the same machine, to avoid the overhead of socket communication. Both uses are performance hacks justified by experience and testing, rather than being architectural choices.

The mmap(2) call is supported under all modern Unixes, including Linux and the open-source BSD versions; this is described in the Single Unix Specification. It will not normally be available under Windows, MacOS classic, and other operating systems.

Before purpose-built mmap(2) was available, a common way for two processes to communicate was for them to open the same file, and then delete that file. The file wouldn't go away until all open filehandles were closed, but some old Unixes took the link count falling to zero as a hint that they could stop updating the on-disk copy of the file. The downside was that your backing store was the file system rather than a swap device, the file system the deleted file lived on couldn't be unmounted until the programs using it closed, and attaching new processes to an existing shared memory segment faked up in this way was tricky at best.

After Version 7 and the split between the BSD and System V lineages, the evolution of Unix interprocess communication took two different directions. The BSD direction led to sockets. The AT&T lineage, on the other hand, developed named pipes (as previously discussed) and an IPC facility, specifically designed for passing binary data and based on shared-memory bidirectional message queues. This is called ‘System V IPC’—or, among old timers, ‘Indian Hill’ IPC after the AT&T facility where it was first written.

The upper, message-passing layer of System V IPC has largely fallen out of use. The lower layer, which consists of shared memory and semaphores, still has significant applications under circumstances in which one needs to do mutual-exclusion locking and some global data sharing among processes running on the same machine. These System V shared memory facilities evolved into the POSIX shared-memory API, supported under Linux, the BSDs, MacOS X and Windows, but not classic MacOS.

By using these shared-memory and semaphore facilities (shmget(2), semget(2), and friends) one can avoid the overhead of copying data through the network stack. Large commercial databases (including Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and Informix) use this technique heavily.



[68] A common error in programming shellouts is to forget to block signals in the parent while the subprocess runs. Without this precaution, an interrupt typed to the subprocess can have unwanted side effects on the parent process.

[69] Actually, the above is a slight oversimplification. See the discussion of EDITOR and VISUAL in Chapter10 for the rest of the story.

[70] The less(1) man page explains the name by observing “Less is more”.

[71] A common error is to use $* rather than “$@”. This does bad things when handed a filename with embedded spaces.

[72] qmail-popup's standard input and standard output are the socket, and standard error (which will be file descriptor 2) goes to a log file. File descriptor 3 is guaranteed to be the next to be allocated. As an infamous kernel comment once observed: “You are not expected to understandthis”.

[73] The friend who suggested this case study comments: “Yes, you can get away with this technique...if there are just a few easily-recognizable nuggets of information coming back from the slave process, and you have tongs and a radiation suit”.

[74] A particularly nasty variant of this attack is to drop in a named Unix-domain socket where the producer and consumer programs are expecting the tempfile to be.

[75] A ‘race condition’ is a class of problem in which correct behavior of the system relies on two independent events happening in the right order, but there is no mechanism for ensuring that they actually will. Race conditions produce intermittent, timing-dependent problems that can be devilishly difficult to debug.


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The Art of Unix Programming
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