[TUHS] If forking is bad, how about buffering?

[Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2328 bytes --]

So fork() is a significant nuisance. How about the far more ubiquitous
problem of IO buffering?

On Sun, May 12, 2024 at 12:34:20PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> But it does come down to the same argument as
>
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf

The Microsoft manifesto says that fork() is an evil hack. One of the cited
evils is that one must remember to flush output buffers before forking, for
fear it will be emitted twice. But buffering is the culprit, not the
victim. Output buffers must be flushed for many other reasons: to avoid
deadlock; to force prompt delivery of urgent output; to keep output from
being lost in case of a subsequent failure. Input buffers can also steal
data by reading ahead into stuff that should go to another consumer. In all
these cases buffering can break compositionality. Yet the manifesto blames
an instance of the hazard on fork()!

To assure compositionality, one must flush output buffers at every possible
point where an unknown downstream consumer might correctly act on the
received data with observable results. And input buffering must never
ingest data that the program will not eventually use. These are tough
criteria to meet in general without sacrificing buffering.

The advent of pipes vividly exposed the non-compositionality of output
buffering. Interactive pipelines froze when users could not provide input
that would force stuff to be flushed until the input was informed by that
very stuff. This phenomenon motivated cat -u, and stdio's convention of
line buffering for stdout. The premier example of input buffering eating
other programs' data was mitigated by "here documents" in the Bourne shell.

These precautions are mere fig leaves that conceal important special cases.
The underlying evil of buffered IO still lurks. The justification is that
it's necessary to match the characteristics of IO devices and to minimize
system-call overhead.  The former necessity requires the attention of
hardware designers, but the latter is in the hands of programmers. What can
be done to mitigate the pain of border-crossing into the kernel? L4 and its
ilk have taken a whack. An even more radical approach might flow from the
"whitepaper" at www.codevalley.com.

In any even the abolition of buffering is a grand challenge.

Doug

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3560 bytes --]