haproxy/doc/internals/api/appctx.txt

Instantiation of applet contexts (appctx) in 2.6.


1. Background

Most applets are in fact simplified services that are called by the CLI when a
registered keyword is matched. Some of them only have a ->parse() function
which immediately returns with a final result, while others will return zero
asking for the->io_handler() one to be called till the end. For these ones, a
context is generally needed between calls to know where to restart from.

Other applets are completely autonomous applets with their init function and
an I/O handler, and these ones also need a persistent context between calls to
the I/O handler. These ones are typically instantiated by "use-service" or by
other means.

Originally a few integers were provided to keep a trivial state (st0, st1, st2)
and these ones progressively proved insufficient, leading to a "ctx.cli" sub-
context that was allowed to use extra fields of various types. Other applets
preferred to use their own context definition.

All this resulted in the appctx->ctx to contain a myriad of definitions of
various service contexts, and in some services abusing other services'
definitions by laziness, and others being extended to use their own definition
after having run for a long time on the generic types, some of which were not
noticed and mistakenly used the same storage locations by accident. A massive
cleanup was needed.


2. New approach in 2.6

In 2.6, there's an "svcctx" pointer that's initialized to NULL before any
instantiation of an applet or of a CLI keyword's function. Applets and keyword
handlers are free to make it point wherever they want, and to find it unaltered
between subsequent calls, including up to the ->release() call. The "st2" state
that was totally abused with random enums is not used anymore and was marked as
deprecated. It's still initialized to zero before the first call though.

One special area, "svc.storage[]", is large enough to contain any of the
contexts that used to be present under "appctx->ctx". The "svcctx" may be set
to point to this area so that a small structure can be allocated for free and
without requiring error checking. In order to make this easier, a specially
purposed function is provided: "applet_reserve_svcctx()". This function will
require the caller to indicate how large an area it needs, and will return a
pointer to this area after checking that it fits. If it does not, haproxy will
crash. This is purposely done so that it's known during development that if a
small structure doesn't fit, a different approach is required.

As such, for the vast majority of commands, the process is the following one:

  struct foo_ctx {
     int myfield1;
     int myfield2;
     char *myfield3;
  };

  int io_handler(struct appctx *appctx)
  {
      struct foo_ctx *ctx = applet_reserve_svcctx(appctx, sizeof(*ctx));

        if (!ctx->myfield1) {
            /* first call */
            ctx->myfield1++;
        }
        ...
  }

The pointer may be directly accessed from the I/O handler if it's known that it
was already reserved by the init handler or parsing function. Otherwise it's
guaranteed to be NULL so that can also serve as a test for a first call:

  int parse_handler(struct appctx *appctx)
  {
      struct foo_ctx *ctx = applet_reserve_svcctx(appctx, sizeof(*ctx));
      ctx->myfield1 = 12;
      return 0;
  }

  int io_handler(struct appctx *appctx)
  {
      struct foo_ctx *ctx = appctx->svcctx;

      for (; !ctx->myfield1; ctx->myfield1--) {
          do_something();
      }
      ...
  }

There is no need to free anything because that space is not allocated but just
points to a reserved area.

If it is too small (its size is APPLET_MAX_SVCCTX bytes), it is preferable to
use it with dynamically allocated structures (pools, malloc, etc). For example:

  int io_handler(struct appctx *appctx)
  {
      struct foo_ctx *ctx = appctx->svcctx;

      if (!ctx) {
          /* first call */
          ctx = pool_alloc(pool_foo_ctx);
          if (!ctx)
              return 1;
      }
      ...
  }

  void io_release(struct appctx *appctx)
  {
      pool_free(pool_foo_ctx, appctx->svcctx);
  }

The CLI code itself uses this mechanism for the cli_print_*() functions. Since
these functions are terminal (i.e. not meant to be used in the middle of an I/O
handler as they share the same contextual space), they always reset the svcctx
pointer to place it to the "cli_print_ctx" mapped in ->svc.storage.


3. Transition for old code

A lot of care was taken to make the transition as smooth as possible for
out-of-tree code since that's an API change. A dummy "ctx.cli" struct still
exists in the appctx struct, and it happens to map perfectly to the one set by
cli_print_*, so that if some code uses a mix of both, it will still work.
However, it will build with "deprecated" warnings allowing to spot the
remaining places. It's a good exercise to rename "ctx.cli" in "appctx" and see
if the code still compiles.

Regarding the "st2" sub-state, it will disappear as well after 2.6, but is
still provided and initialized so that code relying on it will still work even
if it builds with deprecation warnings. The correct approach is to move this
state into the newly defined applet's context, and to stop using the stats
enums STAT_ST_* that often barely match the needs and result in code that is
more complicated than desired (the STAT_ST_* enum values have also been marked
as deprecated).

The code dealing with "show fd", "show sess" and the peers applet show good
examples of how to convert a registered keyword or an applet.

All this transition code requires complex layouts that will be removed during
2.7-dev so there is no other long-term option but to update the code (or better
get it merged if it can be useful to other users).