Next: Introduction, Up: (dir) [Contents][Index]
This manual documents dmd version 0.2, a service manager for the GNU system.
• Introduction: | Introduction to the dmd service manager. | |
• Jump Start: | How to do simple things with dmd. | |
• deco and dmd: | User interface to service management. | |
• Services: | Details on services. | |
• Runlevels: | Details on runlevels. | |
• Misc Facilities: | Generally useful things provided by dmd. | |
• Internals: | Hacking dmd. | |
• GNU Free Documentation License: | The license of this manual. | |
• Concept Index: | ||
• Procedure and Macro Index: | ||
• Variable Index: | ||
• Type Index: |
Next: Jump Start, Previous: Top, Up: Top [Contents][Index]
This manual documents the dmd service manager. It is used to start and stop system services (typically daemons) in a reliable fashion. For instance it will dynamically determine and start any other services that our desired service depends upon. As another example, dmd might detect conflicts between services. In this situation it would simply prevent the conflicting services from running concurrently.
dmd is the init system of the GNU operating system—it is the
first user process that gets started, typically with PID 1, and runs
as root
. Normally the purpose of init systems is to manage all
system-wide services, but dmd can also be a useful tool assisting
unprivileged users in the management of their own daemons.
Unfortunately all flexible software requires some time to master and
dmd is no different. But don’t worry: this manual should allow you to
get started quickly. Its first chapter is designed as a practical
introduction to dmd and should be all you need for everyday use
(see Jump Start). In chapter two we will describe the
deco
and dmd
programs, and their relationship, in
more detail (deco and dmd). Subsequent chapters provide a full
reference manual and plenty of examples, covering all of dmd’s
capabilities. Finally, the last chapter provides information for
those souls brave enough to hack dmd itself.
The name dmd stands for Daemon Managing Daemons (or Daemons-Managing Daemon?).
This program is written in Guile, an implementation of the Scheme programming language, using the GOOPS extension for object-orientation. Guile is also dmd’s configuration language (see GNU Guile Reference Manual). We have tried to make dmd’s basic features as accessible as possible—you should be able to use these even if you do not know how to program in Scheme. A basic grasp of Guile and GOOPS is required only if you wish to make use of dmd’s more advanced features.
Next: deco and dmd, Previous: Introduction, Up: Top [Contents][Index]
This chapter gives a short overview of dmd. It is enough if you just need the basic features of it. As it is not assumed that readers are familiar with all the involved issues, a very experienced user might be annoyed by the often very detailed descriptions in this introduction. Those users are encouraged to just skip to the reference section.
Note that all the full file names in the following text are based on
the assumption that you have installed dmd with an empty prefix. If
your dmd installation for example resides in /usr/local
instead, add this directory name in front of the absolute file names
mentioned below.
When dmd gets started, it reads and evaluates a configuration file. When it is
started with superuser priviledges, it tries to use
/etc/dmdconf.scm
, when started as normal user, it looks for a
file called .dmdconf.scm
in the user’s home directory. With the
option --config
(or, for short, -c
), you can specify
where to look instead. So if you want to start dmd with an
alternative file, use one of the following commands:
dmd --config=/etc/dmdconf.scm.old dmd -c /etc/dmdconf.scm.old
As its name suggests, dmd is just a daemon that (usually) runs in the
background, so you will not interact with it directly. After it is
started, dmd will listen on a socket special file, usually
/var/run/dmd/socket
, for further commands. You use the tool
deco to send these commands to dmd. Usage of deco is simple and
straightforward: To start a service called apache
, you use:
deco start apache
When you do this, all its dependencies will get resolved. For
example, a webserver is quite likely to depend on working networking,
thus it will depend on a service called networking
. So if you
want to start apache
, and networking
is not yet running, it
will automatically be started as well. The current status of all the
services defined in the configuration file can be queried like this:
deco status dmd
Or, to get additional details about each service, run:
deco detailed-status dmd
In this example, this would show the networking
and apache
services as started. If you just want to know the status of the
apache
service, run:
deco status apache
You can stop
a service and all the services that depend on it will be stopped.
Using the example above, if you stop networking
, the service
apache
will be stopped as well—which makes perfect sense,
as it cannot work without the network being up. To actually stop a
service, you use the following, probably not very surprising, command:
deco stop networking
There are two more actions you can perform on every service: The
actions enable
and disable
are used to prevent and allow
starting of the particular service. If a service is intended to be
restarted whenever it terminates (how this can be done will not be
covered in this introduction), but it is respawning too often in a
short period of time (by default 5 times in 5 seconds), it will
automatically be disabled. After you have fixed the problem that
caused it from being respawned too fast, you can start it again with
the commands:
deco enable foo deco start foo
But there is far more you can do than just that. Services can not
only simply depend on other services, they can also depend on
virtual services. A virtual service is a service that is
provided by one or more service additionally. For instance, a service
called exim
might provide the virtual service
mailer-daemon
. That could as well be provided by a service
called smail
, as both are mailer-daemons. If a service needs
any mailer-daemon, no matter which one, it can just depend on
mailer-daemon
, and one of those who provide it gets started (if
none is running yet) when resolving dependencies. The nice thing is
that, if trying to start one of them fails, dmd will go on and try to
start the next one, so you can also use virtual services for
specifying fallbacks.
Additionally to all that, you can perform service-specific actions.
Coming back to our original example, apache
is able to
reload its modules, therefore the action reload-modules
might
be available:
deco reload-modules apache
The service-specific actions can only be used when the service is started, i.e. the only thing you can do to a stopped service is starting it. An exception exists, see below. (If you may at some point find this too restrictive because you want to use variants of the same service which are started in different ways, consider using different services for those variants instead, which all provide the same virtual service and thus conflict with each other, if this is desired. That’s one of the reasons why virtual services exist, after all.)
There are two actions which are special, because even if services can implement them on their own, a default implementation is provided by dmd (another reason why they are special is that the default implementations can be called even when the service is not running; this inconsistency is just to make it more intuitive to get information about the status of a service, see below).
These actions are restart
and status
. The default
implementation of restart
calls stop
and start
on
the affected service in order, the status
action displays some
general information about the service, like what it provides, what it
depends on and with which other services it conflicts (because they
provide a virtual service that is also provided by that particular
service).
Another special action is list-actions
, which displays a list
of the additional actions a service provides; obviously, it can also
be called when the service is not running. Services cannot provide
their own implementation of list-actions
.
A special service is dmd
, which is used for controlling dmd
itself. It implements various actions. For example, the
status
action displays which services are started and which
ones are stopped, whereas detailed-status
has the effect of
applying the default implementation of status
to all services
one after another. The load
action is unusual insofar as it shows a feature that is actually
available to all services, but which we have not seen yet: It takes an
additional argument. You can use load
to load arbitrary code
into dmd at runtime, like this:
deco load dmd ~/additional-services.scm
This is enough now about the deco
and dmd
programs, we
will now take a look at how to configure dmd. In the configuration
file, we need mainly the definition of services. We can also do
various other things there, like starting a few services already.
FIXME: Finish. For now, look at the examples/
subdirectory.
...
Ok, to summarize:
dmd
service is used to control dmd itself.
Next: Services, Previous: Jump Start, Up: Top [Contents][Index]
The daemon that runs in the background and is responsible for controlling the services is dmd, while the user interface tool is called deco, the DaEmon COntroller1. To perform an action, like stopping a service or calling an action of a service, you use the deco program. It will communicate with dmd over a Unix Domain Socket.
Thus, you start dmd once, and then always use deco whenever you want
to do something service-related. Since deco passes its current
working directory to dmd, you can pass relative file names without
trouble. Both dmd and deco understand the standard arguments
--help
, --version
and --usage
.
• Invoking dmd: | How to start the service damon. | |
• Invoking deco: | Controlling daemons. | |
• Invoking reboot: | Rebooting a dmd-controlled system. | |
• Invoking halt: | Turning off a dmd-controlled system. |
Next: Invoking deco, Up: deco and dmd [Contents][Index]
The dmd
program has the following synopsis:
dmd [option…]
It accepts the following options:
Read and evaluate file as the configuration script on startup.
file is evaluated in the context of a fresh module where bindings
from the (dmd service)
module and Guile’s (oop goops)
are
available, in addition to the default set of Guile bindings. In
particular, this means that code in file may use
register-services
, the <service>
class, and related tools
(see Services).
Do not check if the directory where the socket—our communication
rendez-vous with deco
—is located has permissions 700
.
If this option is not specified, dmd
will abort if the
permissions are not as expected.
Log output into file, or if file is not given,
/var/log/dmd.log
when running as superuser, ~/.dmd.log
otherwise.
When dmd is ready to accept connections, write its PID to file or to the standard output if file is omitted.
Receive further commands on the socket special file file. If this option is not specified, localstatedir/run/dmd/socket is taken.
If -
is specified as file name, commands will be read from
standard input, one per line, as would be passed on a deco
command line (see Invoking deco).
Synonym for --silent
.
Next: Invoking reboot, Previous: Invoking dmd, Up: deco and dmd [Contents][Index]
The deco
command is a generic client program to control a
running instance of dmd
(see Invoking dmd). It has the
following synopsis:
deco [option…] action service [arg…]
It causes the action of the service to be invoked. For each
action, you should pass the appropriate args. Actions that are
available for every service are start
, stop
,
restart
, status
, enable
, disable
, and
doc
.
If you pass a file name as an arg, it will be passed as-is to dmd, thus if it is not an absolute name, it is local to the current working directory of dmd, not to deco.
The deco
command understands the following option:
Send commands to the socket special file file. If this option is not specified, localstatedir/run/dmd/socket is taken.
Next: Invoking halt, Previous: Invoking deco, Up: deco and dmd [Contents][Index]
The reboot
command is a convenience client program to instruct
dmd (when used as an init system) to stop all running services and
reboot the system. It has the following synopsis:
reboot [option…]
It is equivalent to running deco stop dmd
. The reboot
command understands the following option:
Send commands to the socket special file file. If this option is not specified, localstatedir/run/dmd/socket is taken.
Previous: Invoking reboot, Up: deco and dmd [Contents][Index]
The halt
command is a convenience client program to instruct
dmd (when used as an init system) to stop all running services and turn
off the system. It has the following synopsis:
halt [option…]
It is equivalent to running deco power-off dmd
. As usual, the
halt
command understands the following option:
Send commands to the socket special file file. If this option is not specified, localstatedir/run/dmd/socket is taken.
Next: Runlevels, Previous: deco and dmd, Up: Top [Contents][Index]
The service is obviously a very important concept of dmd. On the
Guile level, a service is represented as an instance of
<service>
, a GOOPS class (see GOOPS in GNU Guile
Reference Manual). When creating an instance of it, you can specify
the initial values of its slots, and you actually must do this for some
of the slots.
The <service>
class and its associated procedures and methods are
defined in the (dmd service)
module.
• Slots of services: | What a <service> object consists of. | |
• Methods of services: | What you can do with a <service> object. | |
• Service Convenience: | How to conveniently work with services. | |
• Service De- and Constructors: | Commonly used ways of starting and stopping services. | |
• Service Examples: | Examples that show how services are used. | |
• The dmd and unknown services: | Special services in dmd. |
Next: Methods of services, Up: Services [Contents][Index]
A service has the following slots, all of which can be initialized
with a keyword (i.e. #:provides
, used when creating the object)
of the same name, except where stated otherwise. You should not
access them directly with slot-ref
or slot-set!
usually, use the methods of the service class Methods of services instead.
provides
is a list of symbols that are provided by the service.
A symbol can only be provided by one service running at a time,
i.e. if two services provide the same symbol, only one of them can
run, starting the other one will fail. Therefore, these symbols are
mainly used to denote conflicting services. The first symbol in the
list is the canonical name for the service, thus it must be unique.
This slot has no default value and must therefore be initialized.
requires
is, like provides
, a list of symbols that
specify services. In this case, they name what this service depends
on, i.e. before the service can be started, services that provide
those symbols must be started. If a required symbol is provided by
several services, one will be started. By default, this slot
contains the empty list.
running
is a hook that can be used by each service in its own
way. The default value is #f
, which indicates that the service
is not running. When an attempt is made to start the service, it will
be set to the return value of the procedure in the start
slot.
It will also be passed as an argument to the procedure in the
stop
slot. This slot can not be initialized with a keyword.
respawn?
specifies whether the service should be respawned by
dmd. If this slot has the value #t
, then assume the
running
slot specifies a child process PID and restart the
service if that process terminates. Otherwise this slot is #f
,
which is the default. See also the last-respawns
slot.
start
contains the “constructor” for the service, which will
be called to start the service. (Therefore, it is not a constructor
in the sense that it initializes the slots of a <service>
object.) This must be a procedure that accepts any amount of
arguments, which will be the additional arguments supplied by the
user. If the starting attempt failed, it must return #f
. The
value will be stored in the running
slot. The default value is
a procedure that returns #t
and performs no further actions,
therefore it is desirable to specify a different one usually.
stop
is, similar to start
, a slot containing a
procedure. But in this case, it gets the current value of the
running
slot as first argument and the user-supplied arguments
as further arguments; it gets called to stop the service. Its return
value will again be stored in the running
slot, so that it
should return #f
if it is now possible again to start the
service at a later point. The default value is a procedure that
returns #f
and performs no further actions.
actions
specifies the additional actions that can be performed
on a service when it is running. A typical example for this is the
restart
action. The macro make-actions
Service Convenience is provided to abstract the actual data representation
format for this slot. (It actually is a hash currently.)
enabled?
cannot be initialized with a keyword, and contains
#t
by default. When the value becomes #f
at some point,
this will prevent the service from getting started. A service can be
enabled and disabled with the methods enable
and
disable
, respectively Methods of services.
last-respawns
cannot be initialized with a keyword and is only
ever used when the respawn?
slot contains #t
; it is a
circular list with (car respawn-limit)
elements, where each
element contains the time when it was restarted, initially all 0,
later a time in seconds since the Epoch. The first element is the one
that contains the oldest one, the last one the newest.
stop-delay?
being false causes the stop
slot to be
unused; instead, stopping the service will just cause the
waiting-for-termination?
slot be set to #t
.
waiting-for-termination?
cannot be initialized with a keyword
and should not be used by others, it is only used internally for
respawnable services when the stop-delay?
slot contains a true
value. waiting-for-termination?
contains #t
if the
service is still running, but the user requested that it be stopped,
in which case if the service terminates the next time, the respawn
handler will not start it again.
otherwise #f
.
Next: Service Convenience, Previous: Slots of services, Up: Services [Contents][Index]
Start the service obj, including all the services it depends on.
It tries quite hard to do this: When a service that provides a
required symbol can not be started, it will look for another service
that also provides this symbol, until starting one such service
succeeds. There is some room for theoretical improvement here, of
course, but in pratice the current strategy already works very well.
This method returns the new value of the running
slot
Slots of services, which is #f
if the service could not
be started.
This will stop the service obj, trying to stop services that
depend in it first, so they can be shutdown cleanly. If this will
fail, it will continue anyway. Stopping of services should usually
succeed, though. Otherwise, the behaviour is very similar to the
start
method. The return value is also the new running
value, thus #f
if the service was stopped.
Calls the action the-action (a symbol) of the service obj, with the specified args, which have a meaning depending on the particular action.
Returns a list of the canonical names of services that conflict with the service obj.
Returns the canonical name of obj, which is the first element of
the provides
list.
Returns which symbols are provided by obj.
Returns which symbols are required by obj.
Returns whether the service obj is running.
Returns whether the service obj should be respawned if it terminates.
Display status information about obj. This method is called
when the user performs the action status
on obj, but
there is no specific implementation given for it. It is also called
when detailed-status
is applied on dmd
.
Next: Service De- and Constructors, Previous: Methods of services, Up: Services [Contents][Index]
In addition to the facilities listed below, there are also some procedures that provide commonly needed constructors and destructors for services Service De- and Constructors.
Register all services, so that they can be taken into account when trying to resolve dependencies.
Return a list of all registered services which provide the symbol name.
This macro is used to create a value for the actions
slot of a
service object Slots of services. Each name is a symbol
and each proc the corresponding procedure that will be called to
perform the action. A proc has one argument, which will be the
current value of the running
slot of the service.
Start a registered service providing obj.
Stop a registered service providing obj.
The same as the action
method of class <service>
, but
uses a service that provides obj and is running.
Call proc, a procedure taking one argument, once for each registered service.
Check if any of services is running. If this is the case,
return its canonical name. If not, return #f
. Only the first
one will be returned; this is because this is mainly intended to be
applied on the return value of lookup-services
.
Next: Service Examples, Previous: Service Convenience, Up: Services [Contents][Index]
All of the procedures listed below return procedures generated from the supplied arguments. These procedures take one argument in the case of destructors and no arguments in the case of constructors.
The returned procedure will execute command in a shell and
return #t
if execution was successful, otherwise #f
.
For convenience, it takes multiple arguments which will be
concatenated first.
Similar to make-system-constructor
, but returns #f
if
execution of the command was successful, #t
if not.
Return a procedure that forks a child process, close all file
descriptors except the standard output and standard error descriptors,
sets the current directory to directory, changes the environment
to environment-variables (using the environ
procedure), and
executes command (a list of strings.) Return the PID of the child
process.
Returns a procedure that sends signal to the pid which it takes
as argument. This does work together with respawning services,
because in that case the stop
method of the <service>
class sets the running
slot to #f
before actually
calling the destructor; if it would not do that, killing the process
in the destructor would immediately respawn the service.
The make-forkexec-constructor
procedure builds upon the following
procedures.
Run command as the current process from directory, and with
environment-variables (a list of strings like "PATH=/bin"
.)
File descriptors 1 and 2 are kept as is, whereas file descriptor 0
(standard input) points to /dev/null; all other file descriptors
are closed prior to yielding control to command.
fork+exec-command
does the same, but in a separate process whose
PID it returns.
Next: The dmd and unknown services, Previous: Service De- and Constructors, Up: Services [Contents][Index]
FIXME: This needs a lot of work.
You can create a service and then register it this way:
(define apache (make <service> #:provides '(apache) #:start (...) #:stop (...))) (register-services apache)
However, as you usually won’t need a variable for the service, you can
pass it directly to register-services
. Here is an example that
also specifies some more initial values for the slots:
(register-services (make <service> #:provides '(apache-2.0 apache httpd) #:requires '() #:start (...) #:stop (...) #:actions (make-actions (reload-modules (...)) (restart (...)))))
Previous: Service Examples, Up: Services [Contents][Index]
dmd
and unknown
servicesThe service dmd
is special, because it is used to control dmd
itself. It provides the following actions (in addition to
enable
, disable
and restart
which do not make
sense here).
status
Displays which services are started and which ones are not.
detailed-status
Displays detailed information about every registered service.
load file
Evaluate the Scheme code in file in a fresh module that uses the
(oop goops)
and (dmd services)
modules—as with the
--config
option of dmd
(see Invoking dmd).
unload service-name
Attempt to remove the service identified by service-name.
dmd
will first stop the service, if necessary, and then
remove it from the list of registered services. Any services
depending upon service-name will be stopped as part of this
process.
If service-name simply does not exist, output a warning and do
nothing. If it exists, but is provided by several services, output a
warning and do nothing. This latter case might occur for instance with
the fictional service web-server
, which might be provided by both
apache
and nginx
. If service-name is the special
string and all
, attempt to remove all services except for dmd
itself.
reload file-name
Unload all known optional services using unload’s all
option,
then load file-name using load
functionality. If
file-name does not exist or load
encounters an error, you may
end up with no defined services. As these can be reloaded at a later
stage this is not considered a problem. If the unload
stage
fails, reload
will not attempt to load file-name.
daemonize
Fork and go into the background. This should be called before
respawnable services are started, as otherwise we would not get the
SIGCHLD
signals when they terminate.
enable-persistency
When terminating, safe the list of running services in a file.
disable-persistency
Don’t safe the list of running services when terminating.
The unknown
service must be defined by the user and if it
exists, is used as a fallback whenever we try to invoke an unknown
action of an existing service or use a service that does not exist.
This is useful only in few cases, but enables you to do various sorts
of unusual things.
Next: Misc Facilities, Previous: Services, Up: Top [Contents][Index]
RUNLEVELS DO NOT WORK YET! Do not use them! Ignore this section!
A runlevel makes it easier to start and stop groups of services,
to bring the system into a certain state. An object of class
<runlevel>
is an abstract runlevel, and has the following
methods:
This will be called when the runlevel should be entered. services is the list of the currently running services.
This is a list of facilities which are available to code running inside of dmd and is considered generally useful, but is not directly related to one of the other topic covered in this manual.
• Errors: | Signalling, handling and ignoring errors. | |
• Communication: | Input/Output in various ways. | |
• Others: | Stuff that is useful, but is homeless. |
Next: Communication, Up: Misc Facilities [Contents][Index]
If expr yields #f
, display an appropriate error
message and throw an assertion-failed
exception.
Tell dmd that a key error with args has occured. This is the simplest way to cause caught error result in uniformly formated warning messages. The current implementation is not very good, though.
An alias for call-with-current-continuation
.
A simplistic implementation of the nonstandard, but popular procedure
call-with-escape-continuation
, i.e. a call/cc
for
outgoing continuations only. Note that the variant included in dmd is
not aware of dynamic-wind
at all and does not yet support
returning multiple values.
Evaluates the exprs, not going further if a system error occurs, but also doing nothing about it.
Next: Others, Previous: Errors, Up: Misc Facilities [Contents][Index]
The (dmd comm)
module provides primitives that allow clients such
as deco
to connect to dmd
and send it commands to
control or change its behavior (see actions of
services).
Currently, clients may only send commands, represented by the
<dmd-command>
type. Each command specifies a service it applies
to, an action name, a list of strings to be used as arguments, and a
working directory. Commands are instantiated with dmd-command
:
Return a new command (a <dmd-command>
) object for action on
service.
Commands may then be written to or read from a communication channel with the following procedures:
Write command to port.
Receive a command from port and return it.
In practice, communication with dmd
takes place over a
Unix-domain socket, as discussed earlier (see Invoking dmd).
Clients may open a connection with the procedure below.
Open a connection to the daemon, using the Unix-domain socket at file, and return the socket.
When file is omitted, the default socket is used.
The daemon writes output to be logged or passed to the
currently-connected client using local-output
:
This procedure should be used for all output operations in dmd. It outputs the args according to the format-string, then inserts a newline. It writes to whatever is the main output target of dmd, which might be multiple at the same time in future versions.
Previous: Communication, Up: Misc Facilities [Contents][Index]
Create a hash-table with size new-size, and insert all values
from table into it, using eq?
when inserting. This
procedure is mainly used internally, but is a generally useful
utillity, so it can by used by everyone.
Next: GNU Free Documentation License, Previous: Misc Facilities, Up: Top [Contents][Index]
This chapter contains information about the design and the implementation details of dmd for people who want to hack dmd itself. If you want your work to get included in dmd, please contact me and say what you intend to do so that I can give advice on how to do it and we can avoid duplicating work. My development version is usually a bit ahead of what I release, as I only want to publish code that got some testing.
• Coding standards: | How to properly hack dmd. | |
• Design decisions: | Why dmd is what it is. | |
• Service Internals: | How services actually work. | |
• Runlevel evolution: | Learning from past mistakes. |
Next: Design decisions, Up: Internals [Contents][Index]
About formatting: Use common sense and GNU Emacs (which actually is the same, of course), and you almost can’t get the formatting wrong. Formatting should be as in Guile and Guix, basically.
Next: Service Internals, Previous: Coding standards, Up: Internals [Contents][Index]
The general idea of a service manager that uses dependencies, similar to those of a Makefile, came from the developers of the GNU Hurd, but as few people are satisfied with System V Init, many other people had the same idea independently. Nevertheless, dmd was written with the goal of becoming a replacement for System V Init on GNU/Hurd, which was one of the reasons for choosing the extension language of the GNU project, Guile, for implementation (another reason being that it makes it just so much easier).
The runlevel concept (i.e. thinking in groups of services) is
sometimes useful, but often one also wants to operate on single
services. System V Init makes this hard: While you can start and stop
a service, init
will not know about it, and use the runlevel
configuration as its source of information, opening the door for
inconsistencies (which fortunatly are not a practical problem
usually). In dmd, this was avoided by having a central entity that is
responsible for starting and stopping the services, which therefore
knows which services are actually started (if not completely
inproperly used, but that is a requirement which is impossible to
avoid anyway). While runlevels are not implemented yet, it is clear
that they will sit on top of the service concept, i.e. runlevels will
merely be an optional extension that the service concept does not rely
on. This also makes changes in the runlevel design easier when it may
become necessary.
The consequence of having a daemon running that controls the services is that we need another program as user interface which communicates with the daemon. Fortunatly, this makes the commands necessary for controlling services pretty short and intuitive, and gives the additional bonus of adding some more flexibility. For example, it is easiely possible to grant password-protected control over certain services to unprivileged users, if desired.
An essential aspect of the design of dmd (which was already mentioned above) is that dmd should always know exactly what is happening, i.e. which services are started and stopped. The alternative would have been to not use a daemon, but to save the state on the file system, again opening the door for inconsistencies of all sorts. Also, we would have to use a seperate program for respawning a service (which just starts the services, waits until it terminates and then starts it again). Killing the program that does the respawning (but not the service that is supposed to be respawned) would cause horrible confusion. My understanding of “The Right Thing” is that this conceptionally limited strategy is exactly what we do not want.
The way dependencies work in dmd took a while to mature, as it was not easy to figure out what is appropriate. I decided to not make it too sophisticated by trying to guess what the user might want just to theoretically fulfill the request we are processing. If something goes wrong, it is usually better to tell the user about the problem and let her fix it, taking care to make finding solutions or workarounds for problems (like a misconfigured service) easy. This way, the user is in control of what happens and we can keep the implementation simple. To make a long story short, we don’t try to be too clever, which is usually a good idea in developing software.
If you wonder why I was giving a “misconfigured service” as an example above, consider the following situation, which actually is a wonderful example for what was said in the previous paragraph: Service X depends on symbol S, which is provided by both A and B. A depends on AA, B depends on BB. AA and BB conflict with each other. The configuration of A contains an error, which will prevent it from starting; no service is running, but we want to start X now. In resolving its dependencies, we first try to start A, which will cause AA to be started. After this is done, the attempt of starting A fails, so we go on to B, but its dependency BB will fail to start because it conflicts with the running service AA. So we fail to provide S, thus X cannot be started. There are several possibilities to deal with this:
I hope you can agree that the latter solution after all is the best one, because we can be sure to not do something that the user does not want us to do. Software should not run amok. This explanation was very long, but I think it was necessary to justify why dmd uses a very primitive algorithm to resolve dependencies, despite the fact that it could theoretically be a bit more clever in certain situations.
One might argue that it is possible to ask the user if the planned actions are ok with her, and if the plan changes ask again, but especially given that services are supposed to usually work, I see few reasons to make the source code of dmd more complicated than necessary. If you volunteer to write and maintain a more clever strategy (and volunteer to explain it to everyone who wants to understand it), you are welcome to do so, of course…
Next: Runlevel evolution, Previous: Design decisions, Up: Internals [Contents][Index]
Previous: Service Internals, Up: Internals [Contents][Index]
This section describes how the runlevel concept evolved over time. This is basically a collection of mistakes, but is provided here for your information, and possibly for your amusement, but I’m not sure if all this weird dependency stuff is really that funny.
• Runlevel assumptions: | What runlevels should be like | |
• Runlevels - part one: | The first attempts of making it work | |
• Runlevels - part two: | It should work... somehow... |
Next: Runlevels - part one, Up: Runlevel evolution [Contents][Index]
A runlevel is a system state, i.e. it consists of the information about which services are supposed to be available and which not. This vague definition implies that several different runlevel styles can be implemented in a service manager.
For example, you can do it like System V Init, specifying which services should be started when we enter a runlevel and which ones should be stopped when leaving it. But one could also specify for every service in which runlevels it should be running.
In dmd, we do not want to limit ourselfes to a single runlevel style. We allow for all possible strategies to be implemented, providing the most useful ones as defaults. We also want to make it possible to combine the different styles arbitrariely.
Therefore, when entering a runlevel, we call a user-defined piece of code, passing it the list of currently active services and expecting as the result a list of service symbols which tell us which services we want to have running. This interface makes it very easy to implement runlevel styles, but makes it not-so-easy for the runlevel implementation itself, because we have to get from the current state into a desired state, which might be more or less vague (since it is not required to be a list of canonical names). Obviously service conflicts and already running services need to be taken into account when deciding which services should be used to provide the various symbols.
Also, the runlevel implementation should be implemented completely on top of the service concept, i.e. the service part should not depend on the idea of runlevels or care about them at all. Otherwise understanding the service part (which is the most essential aspect of dmd) would become harder than necessary.
Next: Runlevels - part two, Previous: Runlevel assumptions, Up: Runlevel evolution [Contents][Index]
I came up with the following method (here in Pseudo-Scheme), which is possibly slightly buggy, but should give you the idea:
;; Beginning with the canonical names in CURRENT-SERVICES, start and ;; stop services until getting into a state where everything requested ;; in TARGET-SERVICES (which does not only consist of canonical names) ;; is provided, and the things they depends on, but no more. (define (switch-runlevel current-services target-services) (let ((target-services-backup target-services) (unstartable '())) (let retry () (repeat-until-none-of-these-changes-annythig ;; Replace all of them with canonical names which provide them. (canonicalize-names! target-services unstartable current-services) ;; Add what we need additionally. (add-dependencies! target-services unstartable current-services)) (remove-redundancy! target-services) (stop-all-unneeded target-services) (catch 'service-could-not-be-started (lambda () ;; Iterate over the list, starting only those which ;; have all dependencies already resolved, so nothing ;; we don't want will be started. Repeat until done. (carefully-start target-services)) (lambda (key service) (set! unstartable (cons service unstartable)) (set! target-services backup-target-services) (set! current-services (compute-current-services)) (retry))))))
This indeed looks like a nice way to get what we want. However, the details of this are not as easy as it looks like. When replacing virtual services with canonical names, we have to be very careful. Consider the following situation:
The virtual service X is provided by both A and B, while Y is provided only by B. We want to start C (which depends on X) and D (which depends on Y). Obviously we should use B to fulfill the dependency of C and D on X and Y, respectively. But when we see that we need something that provides X, we are likely to do the wrong thing: Select A. Thus, we need to clean this up later. I wanted to do this as follows:
While substituting virtual services with canonical names, we also safe which one we selected to fulfill what, like this:
((A . (X)) (B . (Y)))
Later we look for conflicts, and as A and B conflict, we look which one can be removed (things they provide but are not required by anyone should be ignored, thus we need to create a list like the above). In this case, we can replace A with B as B also provides X (but A does not provide Y, thus the reverse is impossible). If both could be used, we probably should decide which one to use by looking at further conflicts, which gets pretty hairy. But, in this case, we are lucky and end up with this:
((B . (X Y)))
This way of finding out which service we should use in case of conflicts sounds pretty sane, but if you think it will work well, you have been fooled, because actually it breaks horribly in the following situation:
Service | Provides |
A | W X Y - |
B | W X - Z |
C | - X Y Z |
D | W - - - |
If we need all of W, X, Y and Z, then obviously we need to take C and D. But if we have a list like this, we cannot fix it:
((A . (W X Y)) (B . (Z)))
Thus, we cannot do it this way.
Previous: Runlevels - part one, Up: Runlevel evolution [Contents][Index]
Let’s look again at the table at the end of part two:
Service | Provides |
A | W X Y - |
B | W X - Z |
C | - X Y Z |
D | W - - - |
If from this table it is so obvious for us what we should do, then it should also be possible to calculate it for a computer, given such a table as input. Ok, we have to take into account conflicts that are not visible in this table, but the general idea is usable. But how do we find which combination works? I found only one way yet: Kind of a brute force attack: Try combinations until we find one that works.
This alone would be too slow. With 20 services we would have 2^20 possible combinations, that is a bit more than a million. Fortunatly, we can optimize this. First I thought we could remove all services from the list that do not provide any symbol we need, but that is obviously a stupid idea, as we might need them for dependencies, in which case we need to take into account their conflicts. But the following method would work:
Very often a symbol that is required will be a canonical name already, i.e. be provided only by a single service. Using our example above, let’s suppose we also need the symbol V, which is provided only by D. The first step we do is to look which (required) symbols are provided only by a single service, as we will need this service for sure. In this case, we would need D. But by using it, we would also get the other symbols it provides, W in this case. This means that we don’t need to bother looking at other services that provide W, as we cannot use them because they conflict with a service that we definitely need. In this case, we can remove A and B from the list this way. Note that we can remove them entirely, as all their conflicts become irrelevant to us now. In this simple case we would not even have to do much else, C is the only remaining service.
After this first step, there remain the symbols that are provided by two or more services. In every combination we try, exactly one of them must be used (and somehow we should take into account which services are running already). This also reduces the amount of possible combinations a lot. So what remains after that are the services we might need for fulfilling dependencies. For them, we could try all combinations (2^n), making sure that we always try subsets before any of their supersets to avoid starting unneeded services. We should take into account which services are already running as well.
The remaining question is, what to do if starting a service fails. A simple solution would be to recursively remove all services that depend on it directly or indirectly. That might cause undesired side-effects, if a service was running but it had to be stopped because one of the services that provides something it depends on gets exchanged for another service that provides the same symbol, but fails to start. The fact that we would have to stop the (first) service is a problem on its own, though.
Next: Concept Index, Previous: Internals, Up: Top [Contents][Index]
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Some people might argue that it actually is short for “decoration”, indicating that it is useless. :-)