#but yay!! i can't wait to get back to helping systems!!! :D

[alter-soup]

For the next two days I'll be trying my best to finish up the queue and hopefully requests will be back up soon!!! Thank you so much for your patience!!!

[after-nine-at-the-oasis]

Ahh yeah it's nooot good o.o

Who we calling?

AWWW AAHHHHH :'DDDD

That's so cute <33

I love them so much :'))

Anyway WESLEYY :DDD bc yay and also that's who we're calling lol

Ahhh 😬

Well nothing specifically, but no no one's doing anything yet xd also that sounds like illegal lol

Also he's at home XD

True

Aww Angela :(( <3

Yeah bro's still at home chill a bit xD

AWWW yeah he is family 🥺😭😭❤️

Y'all I love them all so much <3

Yeah don't worry he's got it :))

Not gonna break laws but he got it xD

Where's my "I love you" <3

Hmmm yeah something like that xD kinda at work and much more than normal drama lol

Ope?

Charlie maybe?

Who the frick are you

Nahh I don't trust this guy

Oope, is that the nanny?

Yep 😳

Uhh? Doing what calls?

Oh ignoring

YEAH go off Wesley D:< >:D protect her and your home

Uhhh o.o

Ohh and he said boss just registered that o.o uh ohhh

Ohhh noooo

She better not be spying on them or a man on the inside xd just a coincidence 😳😤😑

"You're just in my way" O.O

Listen. . I love me some Wesley angst but. . . he better be okay xdd

But also AAAHHHHHH WESLEY DRAMA :DDD

xD

Uh??

Computer restarting?? Scuse me???

Rude 😭 xD

Y'all this is wild o.o xd this is gonna end up being one of those episodes with a bunch of stuff going on all over the place 😬, like not disorganized but just a bunch of stuff to like everybody, or a diverse group of people anyway o.o but all like, relating/culminating? Idk but it's gonna be wild o.o

AYY WE BACK

Been like 20 minutes because of booting up and then loading and then I was finishing what I was doing in the mean time BUT I'm here :))

That "I didn't invite you in" was so iconic 😌

Yess she isn't

Nahh it is his business

OOP gun o.o

OOAUGHP GO OFF WESLEY

I wanna see Angela worried about him 🥰 <33

Also you're an important lawyer and your wife is a detective xD

And the security system 😎

Y'all are icons <3

STOPPP he's so cool :)))

ICONNN

Girl watching like o.o who am I working for? And why are you so calm in this situation?

XD

YESS go off Wesley 😤😌

OOUPE HI LOVELIES

OHHh right the NDA o.o

So it has come up xd just later than I expected o.o

Ohh yeah their computers and talks about the DA's office o.o

I mean I mentioned being a spy but didn't think about specifics and kinda forgot about it in the light of Wesley <3 xD

Hmmm interesting

Christian Bautista, hmm they seem to recognize him

"You thought a guy in finance had a bodyguard named Headshot" XD real

Ahhh yeah

Oof girl :((

Well at least she didn't want to leave the kids <33

Great job making another high criminal personal enemy Angela xD love that for you guys xD

Kinda do ngl lol

Oop yeah 👀

Ahh

Poor girl :((

Hmm I think she will eventually

Glad she's not automatically like yes! like most of these civilians are though lol

Oop o.o

Imagine if it was one of y'all xD

Ahh probably gonna be Lucy

OOPE?

OOOOPE O.O?

O.O???

My lovelies?

AWWWWW 😭😭😭😭🥺🥺💔❤️❤️

"Are you okay" "I am now" 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺💔💔💔❤️❤️💔💔 AAAHHHHHHH

My lovelies y'all 😭😭

The way they said it :')))

Aww hey guys lol

Ah yep :))

SLDKFJLS ANGELA

An icon <333

Aww yeah :'))

Y'all they're my besties (my babeys who are besties that is) :'DD I love them so much <333

He's always like that lol

Nahh not that guy though xD

Y'all better be careful thoughh xd

Yep o.o

Ouhpe? Working on it while working?

Ohhh no :O a PD day!

Interestinggg

Yeah :((

He's gotten there before and she doesn't wanna make that mistake xd

Lol real girl

Straight up saying it's bs xD

Oooupe o.o

REAL girl xD

Ahh yeah he does 😬

Noo he wouldn't

Hmm yeah you can't get that though

Buuut that's when the recording comes out

LOL?

Ahhh is he seeing her xD

Ohh wait yeah :O

LOL this feels almost even mofe illegal xD it's not though

Ahh so he sees that xd

I'm sure he can kinda be helpful though lol

Ope so he's there all the time XD

LOL Nolan xD

Ayyy :D that's how you get him

Hopefully he doesn't realize it's sus xd

Ahh yeah 😬😬😳

And hopefully she doesn't realize xdd or anyone else

LOL Tim's gonna regret that xD

Ah crap yeah o o 😬😭

Not necessarilyyy 😬😬🥺

[tim-mcnamara]

IO Completion Ports (IOCP) and Asynchronous I/O through STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR

tl;dr Can't be done directly. You have two options: a) mock async I/O with threads, or b) redirect STDIN, STDOUT & STDERR to other file handles that support overlapping (aka non-blocking/async) I/O, such as named pipes.

Background

tokio-rs 0.1 is out! Yay! This is great news for networking, I wonder what life is like for file I/O?

Its getting started examples use an echo server, but I really wanted to learn how to create an efficient worker to fit with th Hadoop Streaming API (among other use cases). That means reading from STDIN and writing to STDOUT. It turns out, tokio doesn't have support for non-blocking I/O for stdio.

Turns out, others have looked into this. As it happens, async I/O and upstream progress has stalled pending more research into how IO Completion Ports work. It seems that Windows being different makes life difficult.

This is going to require more research into how STDIN & co works w/ IOCP. I will tentatively assign this to the 1.0 milestone, but will potentially have to punt if it is tricky.

— carllerche, Dec 2015

Does it look possible?

A fairly large number of projects don't think so. Here is a quote from 2008 that is a fairly telling portent:

Development of the library Boost.Process stopped two years ago. One of the biggest outstanding issues is adding support for asynchronous I/O to stdin/stdout/stderr.

— Boris, asio C++ mailing list

Let's work our way through the MSDN documentation to figure the situation out. To start, let's clear up a few terms os that we all know what we're talking about.

What is an IOCP?

There are some significant differences between the UNIXish multiverse and Windows family when it comes to networking I/O. As well as differing APIs, there is also differing terminology.

Unlike calling select or poll on a single file descriptor, Windows offers you the ability to wrap a file handle in an IO completion port (IOCP). The file descriptor and the completion port are independent, but linked. The port takes care of dealing with the file itself.

Its proponents believe (with good reason) that the completion port model is a good one for supporting interleaved reads and writes acrosss multiple threads without blocking.

Some notes on Windows terminology differences:

Windows uses the term "overlapped I/O" where most UNIX-esque programmers would use the term "non-blocking I/O".

STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR are sometimes referred to as CONIN$, CONOUT$ and CONERR$ within Windows documentation

With all of this in mind, creating an IOCP looks like this under the covers:

HANDLE WINAPI CreateIoCompletionPort( _In_ HANDLE FileHandle, _In_opt_ HANDLE ExistingCompletionPort, _In_ ULONG_PTR CompletionKey, _In_ DWORD NumberOfConcurrentThreads );

The important parameter is FileHandle, an object created by CreateFile. That handle must support overlapped I/O. Here is the relevant extract of the creating an CreateIoCompletionPort reference:

The handle passed in the FileHandle parameter can be any handle that supports overlapped I/O. Most commonly, this is a handle opened by the CreateFile function using the FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED flag (for example, files, mail slots, and pipes). Objects created by other functions such as socket can also be associated with an I/O completion port. For an example using sockets, see AcceptEx. A handle can be associated with only one I/O completion port, and after the association is made, the handle remains associated with that I/O completion port until it is closed.

— "CreateIoCompletionPort function" MSDN

This raises an important question, do the file handles for CONIN$, CONOUT$ & CONERR$ support FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED? We need to look to the documentation for CreateFile to see.

After some browsing, one comes across the section on async I/O describing how to provide the flag. We provide it within the dwFlagsAndAttributes parameter.

Synchronous and Asynchronous I/O Handles

CreateFile provides for creating a file or device handle that is either synchronous or asynchronous. A synchronous handle behaves such that I/O function calls using that handle are blocked until they complete, while an asynchronous file handle makes it possible for the system to return immediately from I/O function calls, whether they completed the I/O operation or not. As stated previously, this synchronous versus asynchronous behavior is determined by specifying FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED within the dwFlagsAndAttributes parameter. There are several complexities and potential pitfalls when using asynchronous I/O; for more information, see Synchronous and Asynchronous I/O.

This gets us closer, but we still don't yet know. When you read the Consoles section of the same article, you discover the documenation explicitly states that the parameter is ignored.

Consoles

The CreateFile function can create a handle to console input (CONIN$). If the process has an open handle to it as a result of inheritance or duplication, it can also create a handle to the active screen buffer (CONOUT$).

...

dwFlagsAndAttributes ignored

So after all of that we discover that no, it's not possible.

Maybe I should have read that original post in a little more detail before hunting through all of the documentation myself:

> If you look at the MSDN docs for CreateFile then you will see, under the > heading Consoles, that CreateFile ignores file flags when creating a > handle to a console buffer. I doubt that there is any way to do genuine > asynchronous io to a console buffer.

— Roger Austin, , asio C++ mailing list

Other Approaches

Clearly, many projects face similar issues. They want to write to STDOUT as fast as possible, without blocking the mail thread. What have they done to create non-blocking servers that access these blocking APIs?

There are two main options:

use threads

redirect STDOUT/etc to another file handle such as a named pipe and perform async I/O on that

Threading

In an article entitled "Asynchronous I/O in Windows for Unix Programmers", Ryan Dahl (creator of node.js), provides a very good discussion of IOCP that includes file I/O, rather than just network I/O. His suggested approach for Console applications is to spawn threads that wait for events that then communicate with the main thread.

Console/TTY

It is (usually?) possible to poll a Unix TTY file descriptor for readability or writablity just like a TCP socket—this is very helpful and nice. In Windows the situation is worse, not only is it a completely different API but there are not overlapped versions to read and write to the TTY. Polling for readability can be accomplished by waiting in another thread with RegisterWaitForSingleObject().

emphasis added

This approach is taken by FastCGI within libfcgi/os_win32.c. STDIN is mocked out, but STDOUT is kept synchronous. The StdinThread function loops in a thread until shutdown:

/* *-------------------------------------------------------------- * * StdinThread-- * * This thread performs I/O on stadard input. It is needed * because you can't guarantee that all applications will * create standard input with sufficient access to perform * asynchronous I/O. Since we don't want to block the app * reading from stdin we make it look like it's using I/O * completion ports to perform async I/O. * * Results: * Data is read from stdin and posted to the io completion * port. * * Side effects: * None. * *-------------------------------------------------------------- */ static void StdinThread(LPDWORD startup){ int doIo = TRUE; int fd; int bytesRead; POVERLAPPED_REQUEST pOv; while(doIo) { /* * Block until a request to read from stdin comes in or a * request to terminate the thread arrives (fd = -1). */ if (!GetQueuedCompletionStatus(hStdinCompPort, &bytesRead, &fd, (LPOVERLAPPED *)&pOv, (DWORD)-1) && !pOv) { doIo = 0; break; } ASSERT((fd == STDIN_FILENO) || (fd == -1)); if(fd == -1) { doIo = 0; break; } ASSERT(pOv->clientData1 != NULL); if(ReadFile(stdioHandles[STDIN_FILENO], pOv->clientData1, bytesRead, &bytesRead, NULL)) { PostQueuedCompletionStatus(hIoCompPort, bytesRead, STDIN_FILENO, (LPOVERLAPPED)pOv); } else { doIo = 0; break; } } ExitThread(0); }

Redirect to another file handle, such as a named pipe

A very old version of Twisted seems to have an implement this approach. (From glancing at the current code, it looks like Twisted has moved back to threads :/ )

There are bound to be more examples around of using a proxy handle around though, as it seems like quite a nifty approach. The relevant MSDN article is "Creating a Child Process with Redirected Input and Output"

The important takeaways seem to be:

set up SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES correctly

make sure your named pipes have unique names

make sure that you are reading and writing correct ends of the pipe from each process

An extract of old Twisted code demonstrating how to proceed looks like this:

# Counter for uniquely identifying pipes counter = itertools.count(1) class Process(object): ... def __init__(...): ... # Set the bInheritHandle flag so pipe handles are inherited. saAttr = win32security.SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES() saAttr.bInheritHandle = 1 # in duplex mode so we can read from it too in order to detect when # Create a pipe for the child process's STDIN. This one is opened # the child closes their end of the pipe. self.stdinPipeName = r"\\.\pipe\twisted-iocp-stdin-%d-%d-%d" % (self.pid, counter.next(), time.time()) self.hChildStdinWr = win32pipe.CreateNamedPipe( self.stdinPipeName, win32con.PIPE_ACCESS_DUPLEX | win32con.FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED, # open mode win32con.PIPE_TYPE_BYTE, # pipe mode 1, # max instances self.pipeBufferSize, # out buffer size self.pipeBufferSize, # in buffer size 0, # timeout saAttr) self.hChildStdinRd = win32file.CreateFile( self.stdinPipeName, win32con.GENERIC_READ, win32con.FILE_SHARE_READ|win32con.FILE_SHARE_WRITE, saAttr, win32con.OPEN_EXISTING, win32con.FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED, 0); # Duplicate the write handle to the pipe so it is not inherited. self.hChildStdinWrDup = win32api.DuplicateHandle( currentPid, self.hChildStdinWr, currentPid, 0, 0, win32con.DUPLICATE_SAME_ACCESS) win32api.CloseHandle(self.hChildStdinWr) self.hChildStdinWr = self.hChildStdinWrDup

Which approach to take?

There are others who are significantly more experienced in this area than I. The conventional approach certainly seems threads, but using redirection does appeal to me for some reason. As it nears midnight, my sugestion to the Tokio team and others would be to go with the approach that's easiest to maintain unless benchmarks prove compelling.