wsasend lpnumberofbytesSent - visual-c++

I am using wsasend on an IOCP structured server.
There is one problem.
wsabuf [bufcount - 1] .buf = pPacket-> GetPacketBufferPtr ();
wsabuf [bufcount - 1] .len = (int) pPacket-> Get_PacketSize ();
iSendSize + = wsabuf [bufcount - 1] .len;
bufcount ++;
int retval = WSASend (pSession-> socket, wsabuf, bufcount-1, & sendbytes,flag, & pSession-> overlapped_Send, NULL);
if (retval == SOCKET_ERROR)
{
if (WSAGetLastError ()! = WSA_IO_PENDING)
{
......
}
}
if (retval == 0)
{
if (sendbytes! = iSendSize)
{
........
}
}
.....
In the code above, I save the packet to send to wsabuf and I send it through wsasend.
And finally, I compared sendbytes and iSendSize .
By the way, sendbytes and iSendSize are Different.
I do not know why.

the actual number of transferred bytes returned from driver, only when operation is completed. io subsystem copy this value to IO_STATUS_BLOCK.Information transmitted to io operation. as result user get back this value. but of course only after operation is completed.
win32 api use OVERLAPPED in place IO_STATUS_BLOCK - reinterpret cast OVERLAPPED to IO_STATUS_BLOCK and pass this pointer to kernel. so InternalHigh will be containing actual number of transferred bytes, but only after operation will be completed (in case error synchronous returned - io subsystem not fill this field, so it value undefined on error. by sense of course 0).
WSASend get value (after call to kernel) from OVERLAPPED.InternalHigh and if lpNumberOfBytesSent not 0 - copy it here. if you use synchronous socket handle - at this moment io operation already will be completed (io subsystem internal wait for this, before return to caller) and valid value from OVERLAPPED.InternalHigh will be copied to *lpNumberOfBytesSent
in code this will be look like
if (!lpOverlapped)
{
OVERLAPPED Overlapped = {};
lpOverlapped = &Overlapped;
}
ZwDeviceIoControlFile(.. reinterpret_cast<IO_STATUS_BLOCK*>(lpOverlapped) ..)
if (lpNumberOfBytesSent)
{
*lpNumberOfBytesSent = (ULONG)lpOverlapped->InternalHigh;
}
in case asynchronous socket handle, operation usually yet not finished after return from kernel. as result lpOverlapped->InternalHigh yet not filled with correct numbers of bytes. and
*lpNumberOfBytesSent = (ULONG)lpOverlapped->InternalHigh;
got incorrect (undefined, if you and system not init it, say to 0) result.
conclusion - you can not use sendbytes for asynchronous io operation. what here is undefined. you can and need got this value when io is completed. how you got it already depend from how you notified about completion.
if you use BindIoCompletionCallback - you got it in
FileIOCompletionRoutine in dwNumberOfBytesTransfered
argument
if you use CreateThreadpoolIo- you got it in
IoCompletionCallback in NumberOfBytesTransferred argument
if you use own IOCP and GetQueuedCompletionStatus - you got
back pointer to your lpOverlapped used in call to WSASend (or
some another io function - this is already your task determinate
where this lpOverlapped used ) after operation was completed. at
this point you can call GetOverlappedResult for this
lpOverlapped (bWait you can set to any value - does not matter because operation already completed - the api will return
immediately in any case without wait) and you got actual number of
transferred bytes in lpNumberOfBytesTransferred. however
GetOverlappedResult simply copy lpOverlapped->InternalHigh
value to *lpNumberOfBytesTransferred so you can and direct,
yourself use InternalHigh without call to GetOverlappedResult

Related

linux socket: lifetime of ancillary data for sendmsg

I use cmsg to activate timestamping on linux socket tx.
ssize_t sendWithOptions
(int sd, std::vector<uint8_t> &payload, uint32_t destIP, int flags)
{
msghdr msg { };
.... // filling standard
std::array<uint8_t, CMSG_LEN(sizeof(__u32))> buf;
msg.msg_control = buf.data();
msg.msg_controlen = buf.size();
auto cmsg { CMSG_FIRSTHDR ( &msg ) };
cmsg->cmsg_level = SOL_SOCKET;
cmsg->cmsg_type = SO_TIMESTAMPING;
cmsg->cmsg_len = buf.size();
*(reinterpret_cast<__u32>(CMSG_DATA (cmsg)) = static_cast<__u32>(flags);
return sendmsg ( sd, &msg, MSG_DONTWAIT );
}
Leaving the function, "buf" is automatically destroyed, but does sendmsg need this buffer to live longer?
Do I have a guarantee that the function does not need this buffer once it has returned the number of bytes sent.
Except for specific interfaces, it is generally the case that operating system calls do not rely on user-space to maintain data structures affecting their operation after they are finished. The exceptions will be spelled out in the manual pages.
With sendmsg, in particular, you can rely on the call to complete immediately - whether successful or not. It's fine therefore to use a dynamically allocated buffer as you're doing, and destroy it immediately after the call.
As an example of one exception, aio_write(2) is specifically intended to allow user-space to queue a write operation that will be completed asynchronously. For this call, the data is not consumed until it can be successfully written. Hence, you must not modify the data structures provided in the call until you have confirmed it is complete. That caveat is called out in the NOTES section of the manual page:
... The control block must not be changed while the write operation is in progress. The buffer area being written out must not be accessed during the operation or undefined results may occur. The memory areas involved must remain valid.
In summary: check the manual page for the system call. But most of the time, you don't need to worry about it.

Serial data acquisition program reading from buffer

I have developed an application in Visual C++ 2008 to read data periodically (50ms) from a COM Port. In order to periodically read the data, I placed the read function in an OnTimer function, and because I didn't want the rest of the GUI to hang, I called this timer function from within a thread. I have placed the code below.
The application runs fine, but it is showing the following unexpected behaviour: after the data source (a hardware device or even a data emulator) stop sending data, my application continues to receive data for a period of time that is proportional to how long the read function has been running for (EDIT: This excess period is in the same ballpark as the period of time the data is sent for). So if I start and stop the data flow immediately, this would be reflected on my GUI, but if I start data flow and stop it ten seconds later, my GUI continues to show data for 10 seconds more (EDITED).
I have made the following observations after exhausting all my attempts at debugging:
As mentioned above, this excess period of operation is proportional to how long the hardware has been sending data.
The frequency of incoming data is 50ms, so to receive 10 seconds worth of data, my GUI must be receiving around 200 more data packets.
The only buffer I have declared is abBuffer which is just a byte array of fixed size. I don't think this can increase in size, so this data is being stored somewhere.
If I change something in the data packet, this change, understandably, is shown on the GUI after a delay (because of the above points). But this would imply that the data received at the COM port is stored in some variable sized buffer from which my read function is reading data.
I have timed the read and processing periods. The latter is instantaneous while the former very rarely (3 times in 1000 reads (following no discernible pattern)) takes 16ms. This is well within the 50ms window the GUI has for each read.
The following is my thread and timer code:
UINT CMyCOMDlg::StartThread(LPVOID param)
{
THREADSTRUCT *ts = (THREADSTRUCT*)param;
ts->_this->SetTimer(1,50,0);
return 0;
}
//Timer function that is called at regular intervals
void CMyCOMDlg::OnTimer(UINT_PTR nIDEvent)
{
if(m_bCount==true)
{
DWORD NoBytesRead;
BYTE abBuffer[45];
if(ReadFile((m_hComm),&abBuffer,45,&NoBytesRead,0))
{
if(NoBytesRead==45)
{
if(abBuffer[0]==0x10&&abBuffer[1]==0x10||abBuffer[0]==0x80&&abBuffer[1]==0x80)
{
fnSetData(abBuffer);
}
else
{
CString value;
value.Append("Header match failed");
SetDlgItemText(IDC_RXRAW,value);
}
}
else
{
CString value;
value.Append(LPCTSTR(abBuffer),NoBytesRead);
value.Append("\r\nInvalid Packet Size");
SetDlgItemText(IDC_RXRAW,value);
}
}
else
{
DWORD dwError2 = GetLastError();
CString error2;
error2.Format(_T("%d"),dwError2);
SetDlgItemText(IDC_RXRAW,error2);
}
fnClear();
}
else
{
KillTimer(1);
}
CDialog::OnTimer(nIDEvent);
}
m_bCount is just a flag I use to kill the timer and the ReadFile function is a standard Windows API call. ts is a structure that contains a pointer to the main dialog class, i.e., this.
Can anyone think of a reason this could be happening? I have tried a lot of things, and also my code does so little I cannot figure out where this unexpected behaviour is happening.
EDIT:
I am adding the COM port settings and timeouts used below :
dcb.BaudRate = CBR_115200;
dcb.ByteSize = 8;
dcb.StopBits = ONESTOPBIT;
dcb.Parity = NOPARITY;
SetCommState(m_hComm, &dcb);
_param->_this=this;
COMMTIMEOUTS timeouts;
timeouts.ReadIntervalTimeout=1;
timeouts.ReadTotalTimeoutMultiplier = 0;
timeouts.ReadTotalTimeoutConstant = 10;
timeouts.WriteTotalTimeoutMultiplier = 1;
timeouts.WriteTotalTimeoutConstant = 1;
SetCommTimeouts(m_hComm, &timeouts);
You are processing one message at a time in the OnTimer() function. Since the timer interval is 1 second but the data source keeps sending message every 50 milliseconds, your application cannot process all messages in the timely manner.
You can add while loop as follow:
while(true)
{
if(::ReadFile(m_hComm, &abBuffer, sizeof(abBuffer), &NoBytesRead, 0))
{
if(NoBytesRead == sizeof(abBuffer))
{
...
}
else
{
...
break;
}
}
else
{
...
break;
}
}
But there is another problem in your code. If your software checks the message while the data source is still sending the message, NoBytesRead could be less than 45. You may want to store the data into the message buffer like CString or std::queue<unsigned char>.
If the message doesn't contain a NULL at the end of the message, passing the message to the CString object is not safe.
Also if the first byte starts at 0x80, CString will treat it as a multi-byte string. It may cause the error. If the message is not a literal text string, consider using other data format like std::vector<unsigned char>.
By the way, you don't need to call SetTimer() in the separate thread. It doesn't take time to kick a timer. Also I recommend you to call KillTimer() somewhere outside of the OnTimer() function so that the code will be more intuitive.
If the data source continuously keeps sending data, you may need to use PurgeComm() when you open/close the COMM port.

mutex unlocking and request_module() behaviour

I've observed the following code pattern in the Linux kernel, for example net/sched/act_api.c or many other places as well :
rtnl_lock();
rtnetlink_rcv_msg(skb, ...);
replay:
ret = process_msg(skb);
...
/* try to obtain symbol which is in module. */
/* if fail, try to load the module, otherwise use the symbol */
a = get_symbol();
if (a == NULL) {
rtnl_unlock();
request_module();
rtnl_lock();
/* now verify that we can obtain symbols from requested module and return EAGAIN.*/
a = get_symbol();
module_put();
return -EAGAIN;
}
...
if (ret == -EAGAIN)
goto replay;
...
rtnl_unlock();
After request_module has succeeded, the symbol we are interested in, becomes available in kernel memory space, and we can use it. However I don't understand why return EAGAIN and re-read the symbol, why can't just continue right after request_module()?
If you look at the current implementation in the Linux kernel, there is a comment right after the 2nd call equivalent to get_symbol() in your above code (it is tc_lookup_action_n()) that explains exactly why:
rtnl_unlock();
request_module("act_%s", act_name);
rtnl_lock();
a_o = tc_lookup_action_n(act_name);
/* We dropped the RTNL semaphore in order to
* perform the module load. So, even if we
* succeeded in loading the module we have to
* tell the caller to replay the request. We
* indicate this using -EAGAIN.
*/
if (a_o != NULL) {
err = -EAGAIN;
goto err_mod;
}
Even though the module could be requested and loaded, since the semaphore was dropped in order to load the module which is an operation that can sleep (and is not the "standard way" this function is executed, the function returns EAGAIN to signal it.
EDIT for clarification:
If we look at the call sequence when a new action is added (which could cause a required module to be loaded) we have this sequence: tc_ctl_action() -> tcf_action_add() -> tcf_action_init() -> tcf_action_init_1().
Now if "move back" the EAGAIN error back up to tc_ctl_action() in the case RTM_NEWACTION:, we see that with the EAGAIN ret value the call to tcf_action_add is repeated.

Safely close an indefinitely running thread

So first off, I realize that if my code was in a loop I could use a do while loop to check a variable set when I want the thread to close, but in this case that is not possible (so it seems):
DWORD WINAPI recv thread (LPVOID random) {
recv(ClientSocket, recvbuffer, recvbuflen, 0);
return 1;
}
In the above, recv() is a blocking function.
(Please pardon me if the formatting isn't correct. It's the best I can do on my phone.)
How would I go about terminating this thread since it never closes but never loops?
Thanks,
~P
Amongst other solutions you can
a) set a timeout for the socket and handle timeouts correctly by checking the return values and/or errors in an appropriate loop:
setsockopt(ClientSocket,SOL_SOCKET,SO_RCVTIMEO,(char *)&timeout,sizeof(timeout))
b) close the socket with recv(..) returning from blocked state with error.
You can use poll before recv() to check if some thing there to receive.
struct pollfd poll;
int res;
poll.fd = ClientSocket;
poll.events = POLLIN;
res = poll(&poll, 1, 1000); // 1000 ms timeout
if (res == 0)
{
// timeout
}
else if (res == -1)
{
// error
}
else
{
// implies (poll.revents & POLLIN) != 0
recv(ClientSocket, recvbuffer, recvbuflen,0); // we can read ...
}
The way I handle this problem is to never block inside recv() -- preferably by setting the socket to non-blocking mode, but you may also be able to get away with simply only calling recv() when you know the socket currently has some bytes available to read.
That leads to the next question: if you don't block inside recv(), how do you prevent CPU-spinning? The answer to that question is to call select() (or poll()) with the correct arguments so that you'll block there until the socket has bytes ready to recv().
Then comes the third question: if your thread is now blocked (possibly forever) inside select(), aren't we back to the original problem again? Not quite, because now we can implement a variation of the self-pipe trick. In particular, because select() (or poll()) can 'watch' multiple sockets at the same time, we can tell the call to block until either of two sockets has data ready-to-read. Then, when we want to shut down the thread, all the main thread has to do is send a single byte of data to the second socket, and that will cause select() to return immediately. When the thread sees that it is this second socket that is ready-for-read, it should respond by exiting, so that the main thread's blocking call to WaitForSingleObject(theThreadHandle) will return, and then the main thread can clean up without any risk of race conditions.
The final question is: how to set up a socket-pair so that your main thread can call send() on one of the pair's sockets, and your recv-thread will see the sent data appear on the other socket? Under POSIX it's easy, there is a socketpair() function that does exactly that. Under Windows, socketpair() does not exist, but you can roll your own implementation of it as shown here.

recv with flags MSG_DONTWAIT | MSG_PEEK on TCP socket

I have a TCP stream connection used to exchange messages. This is inside Linux kernel. The consumer thread keeps processing incoming messages. After consuming one message, I want to check if there are more pending messages; in which case I would process them too. My code to achieve this looks like below. krecv is wrapper for sock_recvmsg(), passing value of flags without modification (krecv from ksocket kernel module)
With MSG_DONTWAIT, I am expecting it should not block, but apparently it blocks. With MSG_PEEK, if there is no data to be read, it should just return zero. Is this understanding correct ? Is there a better way to achieve what I need here ? I am guessing this should be a common requirement as message passing across nodes is used frequently.
int recvd = 0;
do {
recvd += krecv(*sockp, (uchar*)msg + recvd, sizeof(my_msg) - recvd, 0);
printk("recvd = %d / %lu\n", recvd, sizeof(my_msg));
} while(recvd < sizeof(my_msg));
BUG_ON(recvd != sizeof(my_msg));
/* For some reason, below line _blocks_ even with no blocking flags */
recvd = krecv(*sockp, (uchar*)tempbuf, sizeof(tempbuf), MSG_PEEK | MSG_DONTWAIT);
if (recvd) {
printk("more data waiting to be read");
more_to_process = true;
} else {
printk("NO more data waiting to be read");
}
You might check buffer's length first :
int bytesAv = 0;
ioctl(m_Socket,FIONREAD,&bytesAv); //m_Socket is the socket client's fd
If there are data in it , then recv with MSG_PEEK should not be blocked ,
If there are no data at all , then no need to MSG_PEEK ,
that might be what you like to do .
This is a very-very old question, but
1. problem persits
2. I faced with it.
At least for me (Ubuntu 19.04 with python 2.7) this MSG_DONTWAIT has no effect, however if I set the timeout to zero (with settimeout function), it works nicely.
This can be done in c with setsockopt function.

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