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Re: [lwip-users] Clarification of LWIP and multi threading


From: David Hammerton
Subject: Re: [lwip-users] Clarification of LWIP and multi threading
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2011 07:23:55 +1100


I agree abotu the wiki (in fact, the information there is somwhere between misleading and wrong), but what's vague about my email?

"Both the netconn and the socket API are thread-safe as long as you don't share
one netconn/socket between multiple threads (i.e. don't access it from more
than one thread at a time)."

What you want to do is sharing a connection between threads: one thread for reading, one thread for writing. That's not supported, simple as that.

Ok, I suppose your email makes sense when you don't read the wiki. It's kind of silly that the wiki uses the example of another thread closing a socket, whilest thread 1 is still using it for send/recv, which causes a problem - as yes, that would be a problem in any socket environment.
 

> By the looks of it, netconn_send goes
> through a message (either using a lock or a message queue), so I think it
> should be safe?

That's what the wiki talks about, I guess. However, while this *might* work for UDP, it's not something it's supposed to do. If it works, it does so "by accident".

So the send there would be happening on the TCP thread (as a result of the message), is that safe to happen while you are reading on your read/write thread anyway?  It must be, as if your read/write thread does a send() followed immedietly by a recv(), it's going to be the same thing. But I understand what you're saying: it may work, but it's not designed to, so just don't do it.
 

> Also, how am I supposed to use the callback provided
> to netconn_new_with_proto_and_callback? Should I/Can I be calling
> netconn_recv in the thread context of the callback? If not, how can I
> abort
> a netconn_recv if, for example, I need to shut down the connection?

The callback is used for socket select(), for example. It gets called from tcpip_thread, so if you implement your own callback, it has to be thread-safe.

Using a select-like mechanism is usually the way to go with lwIP (instead of having different threads for TX/RX).

Ok. A little while ago I had an lwIP app that was written using the BSD socket layer, and this is exactly what I did. I had to modify the select() call to be able to pass in another object (representing a semaphore, really) that could be used to interrupt the select() call. I couldn't see any way of creating a socketpair() like object to interrupt the select() call. There is no built in way to do this with the BSD socket layer in lwIP, correct?

But for the netconn layer, I guess I can do my own thing. Is this (below)the correct way to do it (sorry, very vague pseudo-code, I don't have the source with me at the moment)? Once I understand this fully I'll write something up for the wiki page to clarify the whole situation.

Thanks

David

enum
{
    READ_READY,
    WRITE_READY
};

static mbox_type sMySelectMbox;

void netconn_callback(....) // always called in tcp thread context
{
    if (RECV_PLUS) // or whatever it's called
    {
        mbox_put(sMySelectMbox, READ_READY);
    }
}

void some_button_pressed() // could happen in any thread context, or interrupt context...
{
    mbox_put(sMySelectMbox, WRITE_READ); // also pass the data somehow.
}

void my_send_recv_thread()  // created with sys_thread_new
{
    while(1)
    {
        msg = mbox_get(sMySelectMbox);
        switch (msg)
        {
              case READ_READY:
                   pbuf = netconn_recv(....);
                   // do something with pbuf and release it
                   break;
               case WRITE_READY:
                   // figure out what to send, store it in pbuf
                   netconn_send(..., pbuf);
                   break;
        }
    }
}
 

Simon
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David Hammerton


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