Weekly Report #8
Submitted on 2010-07-12
Covers 2010-07-05 to 2010-07-12
Status and Accomplishments
• lots of work went to solving the long-standing buffer/pointer parameters and return types issue, and we finally have a reasonably well-working system in place. all address translation / memory space mapping is now done automatically, provided that any pointers to be passed are pointing to memory allocated using the RPC allocator (CMEM based).
• three types of pointer return types are identified and supported: no-translation pointers (such as FILE* which aren't meant to be dereferenced at all), direct-translation pointers (such as strspn whose return value points to somewhere within the passed parameter) and manual-copy pointers (such as ctime when the function allocates memory with some other method and passes that pointer, size information needs to be specified in the GPP stub)
• most C I/O stubs are now complete (the ones remaining are variadics and infeasible things like threads)
Plans and Tasks
• find a way for marshalling variadic function calls (will probably involve manual work) and complete the remaining stubs
• test completed stubs with existing code
• offer more flexibility for buffer/pointer parameters by providing the ability to do address translations manually and maybe detecting non-shared buffers in the DSP-side stubs then syncing them automatically with some shared ones
• support multiple stub input files instead of placing them only in rpc_stubs_gpp.c and rpc_stubs_dsp.c
Risks, issues, blockers
• variadic functions such as printf and scanf are problematic for marshalling - since there is no well-defined way of knowing how many parameters of which size there is, it's likely that the user will have to provide the parameter packing for these manually
• even when the stub generator tool is in place, it's likely that the user will have to provide some manual guidance for certain cases in stub generation such as identifying buffer/pointer parameters which don't need address translation, return types which need manual copying into a shared buffer and variadic functions
Have you looked at libffi for doing the function calls at the GPP side?
ReplyDeleteGlancing at the documentation it seems to be a good fit, however there's a mention of not supporting varargs on some platforms.
libffi looks very suitable for doing the GPP side calls - thanks for pointing it out!
ReplyDelete