From: Brian Cully via Bug reports for GNU Guix <bug-guix@gnu.org>
To: Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>
Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org, "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>,
53580@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#53580: shepherd's architecture
Date: Mon, 29 May 2023 10:46:31 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87fs7fxjut.fsf@psyduck.jhoto.kublai.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Fe3OtPtYH2PHkXerCVPLsOIdvUw04jv5hYL_lms1t-V-JQ8vTvdHyu7Lk-PYfYIBns96NX34wxf8Yb3uNiiPGQzOMjB2hO7_yn3lrILV6fA=@lendvai.name>
Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name> writes:
> it doesn't seem to be an insurmontable task to make sure that
> guile
> can safely unlink a module from its heap, check if there are any
> references into the module to be dropped, and then reload this
> module
> from disk.
>
> the already runing fibers would keep the required code in the
> heap
> until after they are stopped/restarted. then the module would
> get GC'd
> eventually.
>
> this would help solve the problem that a reconfigured service
> may have
> a completely different start/stop code. and by taking some
> careful
> shortcuts we may be able to make reloading work without having
> to stop
> the service process in question.
Erlang has had hot code reloading for decades, built around the
needs of 100% uptime systems. The problem is more complex than it
often appears to people who are used to how lisps traditionally do
it. I strongly recommend reading up on Erlang's migration
system. Briefly: you can't just swap out function definitions,
because they rely on non-function state which needs to be migrated
along with the function itself, and you can't do it whenever you
want, because external actors may be relying on a view of the
internal state. To accomplish this, Erlang has a lot of machinery,
and it fits in to the core design of the language and runtime
which would be extremely difficult to port over to non-Erlang
languages. Doing it in Scheme is probably possible in an academic
sense, but not in a practical one.
OTOH, Lisp Flavoured Erlang exists if you want that syntax. There
would definitely be advantages to writing an init (and, indeed,
any service that needs 100% uptime) on top of the Erlang virtual
machine. But going the other way, by porting Erlang's
functionality into Scheme, is going to be a wash.
> in this setup most of the complexity and the evolution of the
> shepherd
> codebase would happen in the runner, and the other two parts
> could be
> kept minimal and would rarely need to change (and thus require a
> reboot).
Accepting that dramatic enough changes to PID 1 are going to
require a reboot seems reasonable to me. They should be even more
rare than kernel updates, and we accept rebooting there already.
-bjc
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-05-29 15:02 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-01-27 11:32 bug#53580: /var/run/shepherd/socket is missing on an otherwise functional system Attila Lendvai
2022-01-27 12:13 ` bug#53580: (No Subject) Attila Lendvai
2022-02-01 11:06 ` Efraim Flashner
2022-02-01 19:28 ` bug#53580: /var/run/shepherd/socket is missing on an otherwise functional system Maxime Devos
2022-04-04 7:15 ` Attila Lendvai
2023-05-18 20:12 ` Ludovic Courtès
2023-05-27 10:33 ` bug#53580: shepherd's architecture Attila Lendvai
[not found] ` <Fe3OtPtYH2PHkXerCVPLsOIdvUw04jv5hYL_lms1t-V-JQ8vTvdHyu7Lk-PYfYIBns96NX34wxf8Yb3uNiiPGQzOMjB2hO7_yn3lrILV6fA=@lendvai.name>
2023-05-29 14:46 ` Brian Cully via Bug reports for GNU Guix [this message]
2023-06-06 15:16 ` Ludovic Courtès
2023-06-08 12:54 ` Csepp
2023-06-08 20:56 ` Attila Lendvai
2023-06-11 14:16 ` bug#53580: /var/run/shepherd/socket is missing on an otherwise functional system Ludovic Courtès
2023-06-11 14:18 ` Ludovic Courtès
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