31 Oct
2018
31 Oct
'18
10:38 a.m.
I was just reading this book review:
http://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/10/book-review-philosophy-of-software.html
and came across these paragraphs:
<book quote>
The mechanism for file IO provided by the Unix operating system
and its descendants, such as Linux, is a beautiful example of a
deep interface. There are only five basic system calls for I/O,
with simple signatures:
int open(const char* path, int flags, mode_t permissions);
ssize_t read(int fd, void* buffer, size_t count);
ssize_t write(int fd, const void* buffer, size_t count);
off_t lseek(int fd, off_t offset, int referencePosition);
int close(int fd);
</book quote>
The POSIX file API is a great example, but not of a deep
interface. Rather, it’s a great example of how code with a very
complicated interface may look deceptively simple when reduced to C-style
function signatures. It’s a stateful API with interesting orderings
and interactions between calls. The flags and permissions parameters
of open hide an enormous amount of complexity, with hidden requirements
like “exactly one of these five bits should be specified.” open may
return 20 different error codes, each with their own meaning, and many
with references to specific implementations.
The authors of SibylIFS tried to write down an exact description of the
open interface. Their annotated version[1] of the POSIX standard is over
3000 words. Not counting basic machinery, it took them over 200 lines[2]
to write down the properties of open in higher-order logic, and another
70 to give the interactions between open and close.
[1]:
https://github.com/sibylfs/sibylfs_src/blob/8a7f53ba58654249b0ec0725ce38878…
[2]:
https://github.com/sibylfs/sibylfs_src/blob/8a7f53ba58654249b0ec0725ce38878…
I just thought it was a thought-provoking comment on the apparent elegance
of the Unix file API that actually has some subtle complexity.
Cheers, Warren
31 Oct
31 Oct
9:47 p.m.
On 10/31/18, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
The POSIX file API is a great example, but not of a deep
interface. Rather, it’s a great example of how code with a very
complicated interface may look deceptively simple when reduced to C-style
function signatures.
For me one of the most important software design principles is that
the simple and most common use cases should be the simplest for the
user to code. It's OK if complicated things are complicated to code,
but simple things should be kept simple.
I've always thought that the UNIX file primitives very elegantly
adhere to this principle. Reading a file in UNIX is a simple
open()/read().../close() sequence. Contrast that with VMS's $QIO or
IBM OS access methods, where the full complexity is not only exposed
in the interface, it must be considered, set up, and controlled by the
user for even the simplest operations. Multibuffered, asynchronous,
interrupt-driven I/O is more complicated (if not downright clumsy) in
UNIX than in VMS or OS/VS, but that's OK, IMO--it shifts the
complexity burden to those doing complex things.
-Paul W.
11:22 p.m.
On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 12:51 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
For me one of the most important software design
principles is that the
simple and most common use cases should be the simplest for theuser to
code.
It's OK if complicated things are complicated to code, but simple things
should be kept simple.
+1 Amen.
I've always thought that the UNIX file primitives very elegantly adhere
to this principle. Reading a file in UNIX is a simple open()/read().../close()
sequence. Contrast that with VMS's $QIO or IBM OS access methods, where
the full complexity is not only exposed in the interface, it must be
considered, set up, and controlled by the
user for even the simplest operations.
As my friend Tom Texiera once so wisely observered, "*it was not so bad
that QIO had over a 1000 options, it was that each of them had to be test
for on each I/O.*"
I also remember having an argument with Culter about QIO vs UNIX I/O (he
was defending QIO at the time as it was 'better' - as being more
complete). But I pointed out, that it was interesting that after stream
I/O was added to VMS, most DEC customers (and the internal language
libraries team) had switched to using stream (UNIX style I/O) for most
operations because it was simplier and just as fast. It was one of the
few times, I saw Dave stop arguing as he really did not have a response.
Multibuffered, asynchronous, interrupt-driven I/O is
more complicated (if
not downright clumsy) in UNIX than in VMS or OS/VS, but that's OK,
IMO--it shifts the
complexity burden to those doing complex things.
Exactly, those programs that need to do it, can when they need to. That
said, because of our VMS experience, we added ASTs (which I tink are
simplier than UNIX signals) and a QIO like call to RTU because the
Real-Time customers coming from VMS needed (wanted) it. Truth is async
I/O was really useful for some special cases that we had customers that
really need use it. But for the most part the simple UNIX 5 I/O calls
were good enough (athough I would still rather AST's).
BTW: when we added threads we discovered that a lot of the need/use for
async I/O also went away and frankly much of the complexity (clumsiness) of
the async I/O code was not longer needed, as the threading to care of it
and certain was smaller and simplier.
Also, I'll agree it was a tad clumsy, but the old double-dd (ddd) program
(you can find it in the UUNET archives), uses two processes that
communicate via a pipe to do the same trick with a traditional (6th
edition) UNIX I/O system to do some of the same things. Basically the two
processes, take turns between reading and writing. Thus the asynchronous
is purely left in the kernel. The user code is actually very simple.
There is a pipe that passes a token back and forth as to when the next
read/write can start. For old UNIX systems lacking async I/O, ddd(8) was
only way I knew you get a tape drive such as QIC/4 or 8 mm, much less a 1/2
streamer to keep up.
Clem
ᐧ
1 Nov
1 Nov
1:33 a.m.
My version of this:
With JCL, it is as easy to read 1000 tapes as it is to read one tape.
For JCL, substitute the all-singing API of your choice.
On the other hand you can spend a very long time writing code that actually responds
correctly to all the failure cases in, say, a TCP stream connection.
-L
2:57 a.m.
At 2018-10-31T11:47:20-0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
On 10/31/18, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
wrote:
>
> The POSIX file API is a great example, but not of a deep
> interface. Rather, it’s a great example of how code with a very
> complicated interface may look deceptively simple when reduced to C-style
> function signatures.
Indeed. It is my hope that in the coming years software engineers will
decline to describe an interface as "simple" until they've seen how much
logic is required to formally verify it.
For me one of the most important software design principles is that
the simple and most common use cases should be the simplest for the
user to code.
Yes. OpenSSL is an infamous example of design failure in this respect.
However, the term "software design principle" is a bit vague. More
specifically you're identifying a maxim of good programming interface
design.
What's good for a library API is not necessarily what's good for a
system call interface. System calls are not really library functions,
and that is why they have had a different section in the manual from day
one.
open/reda/write/(l)seek/close did not primarily constitute, as I think
they were originally conceived, and API; they were there to expose
_primitives_ of the operating system.
The lateness in coming of the C standard I/O library may have been
something of a problem here; an I/O library is exactly where you want to
press your design principle to the maximum. (On the other hand,
sometimes the design space needs to be explored, and you don't know what
the common cases are going to be because you don't have enough data
points yet. In that case you expose the primitive operations and study
what bubbles up when programmers apply the DRY principle--they are
future standard library calls in disguise.)
But I suspect another problem, even had stdio.h been around in 1972,
would have been the obsessive false economy of "programming close to the
metal". Because the C language did that, and because the system call
interface was there and easy to grab a hold of, tons of application
programmers thought they should follow suit, violating Knuth's principle
about optimization with fervor.
I've always thought that the UNIX file primitives
very elegantly
adhere to this principle. Reading a file in UNIX is a simple
open()/read().../close() sequence. Contrast that with VMS's $QIO or
IBM OS access methods, where the full complexity is not only exposed
in the interface, it must be considered, set up, and controlled by the
user for even the simplest operations. Multibuffered, asynchronous,
interrupt-driven I/O is more complicated (if not downright clumsy) in
UNIX than in VMS or OS/VS, but that's OK, IMO--it shifts the
complexity burden to those doing complex things.
I haven't programmed on VMS or OS/VS, but again this sounds like a
scenario where a standard I/O library should have existed but didn't (or
was inadequate to the demands placed on it--as stdio itself arguably
still is, with a static global errno variable and an original design
that ignored reentrancy entirely, such that we have to consult manuals
to determine which calls are safe for multi-threaded apps or use in a
signal handler).
Context has to be managed somewhere. open()/read()/.../close() only
look simple because a lot of context has been pushed down into the
kernel--the list of flags supported by open() has steadily grown over
the years.
The POSIX openat() system call family is a superior design, though still
saddled with a lot of context. I admit, it is probably more annoying to
use for application programmers who want to use it directly. That's
because they're trying to solve their problems at the wrong level. It
irritates them that they have to keep track of their own contexts (in
this case, a file descriptor). A well-designed library is able to do
this for them, but they want to be close to the metal. And too many of
them will not do the job adequately themselves, so they demand that the
kernel handle it itself. Now the system call interface is even less a
set of primitives, and even more something that's "easy to code to" for
sloppy programmers.
That is one way kernel interfaces, memory requirements, and
task-switching times bloat. How close to the metal does one feel then?
--
Regards,
Branden
3:31 a.m.
On Wed, 31 Oct 2018, Paul Winalski wrote:
I've always thought that the UNIX file primitives
very elegantly adhere
to this principle. [...]
Until Berkeley introduced sockets, which has the worst API that I've ever
seen in Unix-land...
Last place I worked, they had a library that simplified it; the
application said "I am a server on port NNN" and the client said "I want
to talk to port NNN on 1.2.3.4" etc.
I wish I'd "borrowed" that code when I left.
-- Dave
1:42 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 08:31:25AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Wed, 31 Oct 2018, Paul Winalski wrote:
Do you *really* think that IPC System V primitives are better than
sockets?
Pierre
I've always thought that the UNIX file
primitives very elegantly
adhere to this principle. [...]
Until Berkeley introduced sockets, which has the worst API that I've
ever seen in Unix-land...
4:20 p.m.
On Thu, 1 Nov 2018, Pierre DAVID wrote:
Do you *really* think that IPC System V primitives are
better than
sockets?
Nope; they're even worse, which I didn't think was possible. The one
saving grace (IMHO) of SysV was the TTY driver and its cleaner interface.
I did see a proposal a while back (can't remember where/when) to use
something like open("/dev/net/host/port", ...) to establish a network
connection (or a server with appropriate flags), in much the same way that
device files are created dynamically.
With Unix, everything looks like a file, but as I said, the sockets API
broke that convention, forcing users to work at a much lower level than
necessary.
I suppose that around now someone will say that Plan 9 fixed all that :-)
-- Dave
6:57 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 7:48 AM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
I did see a proposal a while back (can't remember
where/when) to use
something like open("/dev/net/host/port", ...) to establish a network
connection (or a server with appropriate flags), in much the same way that
device files are created dynamically.
Dave - that's how the original UNIX ChaosNet code worked and the original
BBN TCP (before sockets). Apollo used the same scheme with Aegis/Domain
(probably because Larry Allen implemented both UNIX Chaos and Aegis IIRC).
P9 took a different path still (pun intended).
Clem
8:19 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 7:05 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
P9 took a different path still (pun intended).
as in: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/
It shows that you can use the pathname model for networks, And it
shows one way to get it right. There are others.
Here's a simple example of what get it right means:
there are *no* commands on Plan 9 that end in 6. No ping6, for
example. Plan 9 did not fall over sideways, as Unix did, when
infiiniband introduced 20 octet addresses, which are
the ip6 address and "more".
Just look at how many sockaddr_* there are Linux nowadays, including
those odd ones that have a name starting with a null byte. In Plan 9
there are 1, since a sockaddr in plan 9 is ... a string.
That's not to say plan 9 got it perfect. it's just to say that one can
use the Unix model of pathnames, open/read/write/close, for networks
and IPC in general (even pipes).
It's just a shame nobody's caught on yet ;-)
And, to repeat, a bunch of us in the 80s tried to implement the idea
of /dev/net/host/port (mind was in AmigaDOS), and it fails badly for
all kinds of reasons.
simple one:
what's the implications of
mv /dev/net/harv/20 /dev/net/prep/35
what happens? If only somebody could only find Rob's talk which delves
into this in such nice detail ...
In my view, what went wrong with Unix networking 40 years ago is that
it broke from the Unix model, i.e. that resources are accessed via
path names, and went with binary descriptors as paths. But what can
you do? Synthetics were yet to be created.
ron
8:41 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 10:20 AM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In my view, what went wrong with Unix networking 40
years ago is that it
broke from the Unix model, i.e. that resources are accessed via path
names, and went with binary descriptors as paths.
Agreed.
And I think somthing else where P9 differed from UNIX was dealing with OOB
(control) information (*i.e.* ioctl(2) was a terrible misstake). Dennis
and Ken created ioctl(2) with v7 as a generalization of stty/gtty from the
TTY handler. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable way to handle those
'small things that need to be tweeked - like baud rate or canonicalization;
but ioctl(2) quickly got abused as the universal end-around, and those
things caused also sorts of issues (also being a binary interface only made
it worse, although on the PDP-11 it made sense for size reasons).
Creating a seperate interface from the 'file' to orchestrate/control the
I/O and controlling that as a set of strings not binaries, seems like a more
sane idea.
ᐧ
10:43 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 9:38 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 10:20 AM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There's another school of thought too that says the kernel has no business
parsing strings with all the security implications of doing so...
Warner
In my view, what went wrong with Unix networking
40 years ago is that it
broke from the Unix model, i.e. that resources are accessed via path
names, and went with binary descriptors as paths.
Agreed.
And I think somthing else where P9 differed from UNIX was dealing with OOB
(control) information (*i.e.* ioctl(2) was a terrible misstake). Dennis
and Ken created ioctl(2) with v7 as a generalization of stty/gtty from the
TTY handler. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable way to handle those
'small things that need to be tweeked - like baud rate or canonicalization;
but ioctl(2) quickly got abused as the universal end-around, and those
things caused also sorts of issues (also being a binary interface only
made it worse, although on the PDP-11 it made sense for size reasons).
Creating a seperate interface from the 'file' to orchestrate/control the
I/O and controlling that as a set of strings not binaries, seems like a
more sane idea.
ᐧ
10:48 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 9:44 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
There's another school of thought too that says the kernel has no business
parsing strings with all the security implications of doing so...
yeah, it's an interesting question. But Unix is based on parsing strings.
The kernel already parses lots of strings for paths, for all kinds of
reasons, so adding another element in the kernel that uses paths seems
acceptable.
The bigger problem for Plan 9 that started to bite was i8n. All the Plan 9
messages are English, oops. All the control messages are english. And so
on.
And, further, that network architecture I referenced is much less efficient
than the BSD model -- 5 system calls per accept! so that was starting to
hit us here on the Akaros project, since we imported the entire Plan 9
network stack into akaros, along with the drivers. Linux left us in the
dust on network connections/second. We were going to change it had Akaros
continued.
ron
10:56 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 10:48 AM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 9:44 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
Well, if the nose of a camel comes in under the tent, the rest of the camel
is sure to follow... Parsing a string path is rock simple, but are there
two arguments or three for this command, and what happens if they are too
long, or negative when you expect and fd, or or or. The CVE-archive is
littered with people who thought parsing in the kernel was simple and
easy...
There's another school of thought too that says the kernel has no
business parsing strings with all the security implications of doing so...
yeah, it's an interesting question. But Unix is based on parsing strings.
The kernel already parses lots of strings for paths, for all kinds of
reasons, so adding another element in the kernel that uses paths seems
acceptable.
The bigger problem for Plan 9 that started to bite was
i8n. All the Plan 9
messages are English, oops. All the control messages are english. And so
on.
And, further, that network architecture I referenced is much less
efficient than the BSD model -- 5 system calls per accept! so that was
starting to hit us here on the Akaros project, since we imported the entire
Plan 9 network stack into akaros, along with the drivers. Linux left us in
the dust on network connections/second. We were going to change it had
Akaros continued.
That's the other reason to not do stings in the kernel: parsing is takes
time.
I'll grant there's a balance here: A single int fd is nice so you don't
have to pass a pointer to the device call function and provides a level of
abstraction that blocks many bad data attacks. But even with this interface
there's been issues with improper range checks for some interfaces.
Warner
2 Nov
2 Nov
11:24 a.m.
On Thu, 01 Nov 2018 09:48:38 -0700 ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 9:44 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> There's another school of thought too that says the kernel has no business
> parsing strings with all the security implications of doing so...
Which is more a function of C. A proper string type might've
helped. I would argue it is *easier* to debug string based
stuff than all those ioctls using magic numbers replaced with
#defines.
And, further, that network architecture I referenced
is much less efficient
than the BSD model -- 5 system calls per accept! so that was starting to
hit us here on the Akaros project, since we imported the entire Plan 9
network stack into akaros, along with the drivers. Linux left us in the
dust on network connections/second. We were going to change it had Akaros
continued.
What sort of changes were you contemplating?
I view(ed) 9p more as a prototype.
4 Nov
4 Nov
4:53 p.m.
On Nov 1, 2018, at 3:20 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
With Unix, everything looks like a file, but as I said, the sockets API broke that
convention, forcing users to work at a much lower level than necessary.
This was broken from the start though, and always really meant everything looks like a
file *descriptor*, not a path in the filesystem.
There are tons of non-file descriptor namespaces on UNIX platforms. At least some later
systems have tried to create a hierarchical “object” abstraction of which file descriptors
are just one subtype.
-- Chris
9:34 p.m.
On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 4:00 AM Chris Hanson <cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net> wrote:
This was broken from the start though, and always
really meant everything looks like a file *descriptor*, not a path in the filesystem.
OK, I only got into this game in 1976, and a lot had happened in Unix by then,
and maybe you saw some earlier stuff. But certainly in 1976, as
compared to the other 4 PDP-11 operating systems I was using,
the fact that resources had names visible to every program was very
important to us. On the competitor systems the naming would be built
into individual programs,
e.g. PIP or (non-PDP11) the MPE fcopy program, one of the few programs
on that system where you could name, e.g., the tape drive on your
terminal.
Being able to use a path name for resources was a very big deal for us
at the time. And we didn't say file descriptors, we said names.
Hence, I rate your comment as "interesting if true" but I see no
evidence to support it.
ron
11:06 p.m.
On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:31 AM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 4:00 AM Chris Hanson
<cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net>
wrote:
It depends on what you did...
Tapes were always special. You could access them via a named interface, but
it was tricky. Tapes are stateful creatures, and some programs wanted
stateful, others wanted stateless. So you got different devices to do
different behavior. Easy to oops and use the rmt0 instead of the nrmt0
device. So while it was a file, it was a file that had odd state you didn't
have disks.
Serial ports were worse. There you had no way to control the serial port
except with fancy extra programs. There was no /dev/ttyd0.9600.8N1 devnode
to open. If you wanted 9600 baud, you had to either hack the driver to do
that on open, or you had to hack your programs to know they were talking to
a special thing and needed special code to cope (raw vs cooked was another
one). so, sure, it was file based, but not entirely file based as you had
to escape to either hacky system calls (v6 and earlier) or later
generalized ioctls (v7 and later).
Every other snowflake device had it's own config program that you had to
run (or ioctls your data collection programs had to do). Setting up the
sampling rates for the A2D, or the signal strength for an IRIG generator or
whatever.
So sure, you could address these devices by a file name, but you couldn't
"cp config /dev/irig" or "cat /dev/ttyd0.2400.7O2" to get data flowing
on
the devices, so their addresses in the filesystem namespace were of limited
value since some files were more special than others.
I'm not sure plan-9 solved this by having a second device side-channel
either in its attempt to try a different approach to side-channel
communications than ioctl(2).
Network sockets are a logical conclusion to this state of affairs, btw. All
the plethera of new system calls for them could have been done as ioctls,
though the generic processing stuff for ioctls would have gotten in the way
of some of the socket API. It's another twist on the baud rate problem: I
need to communicate metadata about how to do things to the driver... And in
this case, a lot of the 'how to do things' is negotiated via a different
side channel (routed, ARP, etc) and so you no longer had a raw physical
network device to open, but a logical, cooked one that you interacted at
the top of the stack to and all those other details were abstracted out /
taken care of in other ways. It's unfortunate that you can't just open
"/dev/net/sri-nic.arpa" and have it do the right thing, but files kinda
want to be stateless and there's a lot of state about what you want to do
with that open command...
And while mounting allowed one to get files from a disk, it wasn't so good
at doing things dynamically (as the original system were quite static) and
required a number of ad-hoc hacks to make work right. block vs character
devices showed early on a crack in the uniformity.
So while I love the ideal, I also see how the practical side of things
forced us down the path we're down, ugly warts and all. I'd love to see
someone start with V7ish level of kernel, but add the modern things like
devfs (so one could pass 'state' strings to drivers on 'open' and have
them
accept/reject them to get around some of these issues), as well as provide
all objects in a namespace that's sane and mostly enumerable. For that
you'd need new abstractions (like saying that all drivers don't interact
via cdev-nodes like today, but instead present a filesystem-like interface
so you'd open /dev/tty/d0/9600n1/hw-flow and the tty driver would get a
message for its d0 instance of 9600n1/hw-flow, though this would break
dirent(2)). In this world, you could have most of the crazy encoded into a
path for network operations as well... though I have doubts you could do it
in as a performant manner as sockets).
Warner
This was broken from the start though, and always
really meant
everything looks like a file *descriptor*, not a path in the
filesystem.
OK, I only got into this game in 1976, and a lot had happened in Unix by
then,
and maybe you saw some earlier stuff. But certainly in 1976, as
compared to the other 4 PDP-11 operating systems I was using,
the fact that resources had names visible to every program was very
important to us. On the competitor systems the naming would be built
into individual programs,
e.g. PIP or (non-PDP11) the MPE fcopy program, one of the few programs
on that system where you could name, e.g., the tape drive on your
terminal.
Being able to use a path name for resources was a very big deal for us
at the time. And we didn't say file descriptors, we said names.
Hence, I rate your comment as "interesting if true" but I see no
evidence to support it.
5 Nov
5 Nov
2 a.m.
On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:06 AM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
Every other snowflake device had it's own config
program that you had to run (or ioctls your data collection programs had to do). Setting
up the sampling rates for the A2D, or the signal strength for an IRIG generator or
whatever.
I'm not saying that having a name for everything solved the world's
problems. I'm saying that in Unix, as of the mid 1970s, things could
be named, including devices. And if you weren't using the other
systems available at the time, it's almost impossible to appreciate
just how important that was. I also used contemporary systems such as
OS/MVS, where even in the mid 70s we were accessing data sets by using
a disk and block #.
Although there is an analogy: do you prefer to name your personal
machine 2130706433 or localhost?
ron
12:52 a.m.
On Nov 4, 2018, at 2:53 AM, Chris Hanson
<cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net> wrote:
A “file” descriptor is very much like a capability, a handle.
This is separate from hierarchical naming intended for humans.
They are both needed. An ability to name something doesn’t
give you an automatic right to access it. And you don’t always
need to name something. For instance creating a pipe. The
third feature was capturing IO operations to a rather diverse set
of devices and files in a relatively simple interface. The fourth
feature that first attracted me first to Unix was its simple scheme
of major, minor device numbers. The “elegance” of Unix was that
you could get a lot done using a few abstractions. They were not
perfect but were good enough for the most part.
On Nov 1, 2018, at 3:20 AM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
With Unix, everything looks like a file, but as I said, the sockets API broke that
convention, forcing users to work at a much lower level than necessary.
This was broken from the start though, and always really meant everything looks like a
file *descriptor*, not a path in the filesystem.
4 Nov
4 Nov
4:49 p.m.
If anyone ever asks me about the elegance of UNIX, there’s one word, or really term, that
springs to mind: EINTR.
The fact that man pages on modern systems still describe calls as returning -1 with errno
set to EINTR baffles me.
-- Chris
6:28 p.m.
Chris Hanson <cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net> wrote:
If anyone ever asks me about the elegance of UNIX,
there’s one word, or really term, that springs to mind: EINTR.
The fact that man pages on modern systems still describe calls as returning -1 with errno
set to EINTR baffles me.
-- Chris
Can you explain this some more? This sounds like a claim that UNIX
isn't elegant. But I'm not following whatever it is you're saying.
Thanks,
Arnold
5 Nov
5 Nov
3:34 a.m.
On Nov 4, 2018, at 4:28 AM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Chris Hanson <cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net> wrote:
Every piece of code that wants to call, say, read(2) needs to handle not only real errors
but also needs to special-case EINTR and retry the read. Thus you should virtually never
use read(2), only ever something like this:
ssize_t safe_read(int fd, void *buf, size_t buf_size)
{
ssize_t rc;
do {
rc = read(fd, buf, buf_size);
} while ((rc == -1) && (errno == EINTR));
return rc;
}
And do this for every classic system call, since virtually no client code should ever have
to care about EINTR. It was early an implementation expediency that became API and that
everyone now has to just deal with because you can’t expect the system call interface you
use to do this for you.
This is the sort of wart that should’ve been fixed by System V and/or BSD 4 at latest.
— Chris
If anyone ever asks me about the elegance of
UNIX, there’s one word, or really term, that springs to mind: EINTR.
The fact that man pages on modern systems still describe calls as returning -1 with errno
set to EINTR baffles me.
Can you explain this some more? This sounds like a claim that UNIX
isn't elegant. But I'm not following whatever it is you're saying.
8:11 p.m.
At 4 Nov 2018 22:07:46 +0000 (+00:00) from Chris Hanson
<cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net>:
And do this for every classic system call, since
virtually no client code should ever have to care about EINTR. It was early an
implementation expediency that became API and that everyone now has to just deal with
because you can’t expect the system call interface you use to do this for you.
This is the sort of wart that should’ve been fixed by System V and/or BSD 4 at latest.
you are right!
4 Nov
4 Nov
7:35 p.m.
On Sun, Nov 4, 2018, 4:28 AM Chris Hanson <cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net wrote:
If anyone ever asks me about the elegance of UNIX,
there’s one word, or
really term, that springs to mind: EINTR.
The fact that man pages on modern systems still describe calls as
returning -1 with errno set to EINTR baffles me.
Why? It's still a thing...
Warner
2238
days inactive
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25 comments
13 participants
participants (13)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Bakul Shah -
Chris Hanson -
Clem Cole -
Dave Horsfall -
Donald ODona -
G. Branden Robinson -
Lawrence Stewart -
Paul Winalski -
Pierre DAVID -
ron minnich -
Warner Losh -
Warren Toomey