This patch separates the character and block driver communication
protocols. The old character protocol remains the same, but a new
block protocol is introduced. The libdriver library is replaced by
two new libraries: libchardriver and libblockdriver. Their exposed
API, and drivers that use them, have been updated accordingly.
Together, libbdev and libblockdriver now completely abstract away
the message format used by the block protocol. As the memory driver
is both a character and a block device driver, it now implements its
own message loop.
The most important semantic change made to the block protocol is that
it is no longer possible to return both partial results and an error
for a single transfer. This simplifies the interaction between the
caller and the driver, as the I/O vector no longer needs to be copied
back. Also, drivers are now no longer supposed to decide based on the
layout of the I/O vector when a transfer should be cut short. Put
simply, transfers are now supposed to either succeed completely, or
result in an error.
After this patch, the state of the various pieces is as follows:
- block protocol: stable
- libbdev API: stable for synchronous communication
- libblockdriver API: needs slight revision (the drvlib/partition API
in particular; the threading API will also change shortly)
- character protocol: needs cleanup
- libchardriver API: needs cleanup accordingly
- driver restarts: largely unsupported until endpoint changes are
reintroduced
As a side effect, this patch eliminates several bugs, hacks, and gcc
-Wall and -W warnings all over the place. It probably introduces a
few new ones, too.
Update warning: this patch changes the protocol between MFS and disk
drivers, so in order to use old/new images, the MFS from the ramdisk
must be used to mount all file systems.
Before safecopies, the IO_ENDPT and DL_ENDPT message fields were needed
to know which actual process to copy data from/to, as that process may
not always be the caller. Now that we have full safecopy support, these
fields have become useless for that purpose: the owner of the grant is
*always* the caller. Allowing the caller to supply another endpoint is
in fact dangerous, because the callee may then end up using a grant
from a third party. One could call this a variant of the confused
deputy problem.
From now on, safecopy calls should always use the caller's endpoint as
grant owner. This fully obsoletes the DL_ENDPT field in the
inet/ethernet protocol. IO_ENDPT has other uses besides identifying the
grant owner though. This patch renames IO_ENDPT to USER_ENDPT, not only
because that is a more fitting name (it should never be used for I/O
after all), but also in order to intentionally break any old system
source code outside the base system. If this patch breaks your code,
fixing it is fairly simple:
- DL_ENDPT should be replaced with m_source;
- IO_ENDPT should be replaced with m_source when used for safecopies;
- IO_ENDPT should be replaced with USER_ENDPT for any other use, e.g.
when setting REP_ENDPT, matching requests in CANCEL calls, getting
DEV_SELECT flags, and retrieving of the real user process's endpoint
in DEV_OPEN.
The changes in this patch are binary backward compatible.
