Re: Coroutine library scheduler
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- Subject: Re: Coroutine library scheduler
- From: Sean Conner <sean@...>
- Date: 2014年2月24日 17:14:42 -0500
It was thus said that the Great John Hind once stated:
> I do not have a suggestion for anything that already exists, but I do
> think something really powerful could be done with a coroutine scheduler
> for Lua.
>
> For example, I would like to be able to say "yield this coroutine until
> some real-time criterion is met" ( yield(for 10 seconds), or yield(until
> packet received OR 20 seconds has elapsed) ).
I've written such code, to turn event based programming (using poll() or
epoll(), depending upon the underlying operating system [1]. One thing to
remember: Lua coroutines are cooperative, not preemtive [2]. For the code
I've written, given that it's mostly network driven, I explicitely ignore
the fact that any coroutine could hog the CPU indefinitely (that is: I have
to make sure I have no infinite loops---I'm not going to attempt to
implement preemptive threading). But, any routine that could potentially
"block" now becomes a point of scheduling, which means, I have to supply my
own read() and write() calls (or even sleep()).
(For the record, I recently did a test and figured out that a coroutine on
32 bit x86 system is around 900 bytes---much smaller and lighter than a
pthread)
> But that coroutine scheduling idea is just so technically sweet ...
The scheduler I have is simple: I'm either waiting for an event, or I'm
not. As such, I have two lists, one of a list of coroutine waiting for an
event, and a list of coroutines that are ready to run (because their events
have arrived). Simple round-robin scheduling. I found no need for anything
more complicated than that. [3]
-spc (I can post code if anyone is interested)
[1] Unix variants, I should note.
[2] Yes, you can do preemtive Lua coroutine, if you want performace to
drop like a stone. To do it safely, you have to hook into the debug
layer and trap either intructions (each routine to run for X
instructions), lines, or functions. I personally don't recomend it.
[3] Really, any more complicated than that, and you know what? You're
writing a kernel.