Re: mirage + froc = self-scaling?

[Raphael Proust <raphlalou@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Some background on FRP, and specifically the FROC self-adjusting library:
> http://ambassadortothecomputers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/how-froc-works.html
>
> The goal of this work is to encode the external dependencies of a Mirage 
> unikernel explicitly, so that changes can ripple through the various 
> computation units in a well-defined manner.  The tricky bit is that I/O 
> threads ('the outside world') need to be strongly separated from FROC ('the 
> configuration space')
>
> Consider the case of an ARP input packet, which needs to update a 
> configuration variable (the ARP table), but is in the middle of doing some 
> I/O.  However, we want to safely weave together static input (a static ARP 
> configuration) with the dynamic inputs, which is where Froctol comes from.  
> There are many, many cases of such undefined behaviour in conventional 
> operating systems: what happens to existing network sockets when a DHCP 
> server rebinds an IP address on your machine?
>
> Raphael, are your experiments with this from last summer available anywhere?  
> I couldn't spot them in your Github repo list.

They are in a repo of yours: https://github.com/avsm/ocaml-ld

The following comment (in lib/froc_lwt) is interesting. It list things
that should be avoided when mixing the two paradigms
(cooperative-threading and reactive).


(*DOs and DONTs
*
* DONT expose writables (because it exposes the next DONT to the user)
* DONT change and yield (or otherwise switch thread)
* This can lead to partial changes being propagated. If you need to change
* several values before propagation, treat all the changes as a critical
* section, and make sure you propagate before yielding.
* DONT bypass Froc_sa.bind by creating a new changeable, manually write and
* propagate.
* DONT implement events over changeables. This restriction ensures that the
* whole system (in particullar, the data-plan) will be reactive (although
* theoretically appealing, it is better, for performance reasons, to
* restrict the reactive part to the configuration-plan).
* DONT use read under a bind (to avoid inconsistencies) but
* DO use read when you are in the data-plane (and thus not threading the
* changeables around).
*)



One thing that is quite important with Froc: you can set several
changes and push them in one go. Thus, when reconfiguring it is
important to not yield in between different changes (otherwise another
thread might push).


>
> -anil
>
> On 28 Mar 2013, at 11:05, Richard Mortier <Richard.Mortier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote:
>
>> hi all;
>>
>> after a chat with anil at asplos, i've begun playing around with using Froc 
>> with Mirage (actually, in the first instance, using Froc with Lwt). FRP is 
>> probably a good approach to try and encode notions of self-scaling that 
>> we've talked about before -- so a Froc self-adjusting computation becomes 
>> the overall framework within which Lwt threads execute to handle IO.
>>
>> if anyone wants to take a look at what i've done so far, code is in 
>> <https://github.com/mor1/froctal> (neat name, huh? :)
>>
>> this is very much work in progress, so suggestions for nice ways to 
>> integrate Froc and Lwt gratefully received!
>>
>> --
>> Cheers,
>>
>> R.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>



-- 
______________
RaphaÃl Proust