I'm designing a control system which should handle too many actuators (or sets of actuators) over a serial port. The new design (not implemented yet) is supposed to control actuators over multiple POSIX threads.
Is this possible to open a serial port multiple times (by multiple threads)?
If yes, I'm gonna write a synchronous write / asynchronous read mechanism. There will be n threads M[0] to M[n-1] which can write data directly to serial port. They're not supposed to read from serial port directly. Instead, a thread R is supposed to read data from port in a while(true) loop and serve data to corresponding threads waiting for it. (Wake up M[i] which is waiting for response, when data is ready and it belongs to ith thread)
It's all depended on the question if it's possible to write to serial port by multiple threads or not.
notes: I can't test the behavior of serial port, because currently I have no access to devices in mechatronics lab of my university,
I'm using kernel 2.6.38-8 patched with Xenomai real-time subsystem (if important)
I'm porting code to traditional Linux way of communicating with serial port. (Open /dev/ttyS0, set baudrate, read(), write(), etc.) Currently a third party library is used to talk with serial port.
You can open the same serial port only once. The second trial fails with Access Denied. Once the port is opened, you can work with it in different threads, using the port handle. Of course, you need to synchronize port access between these threads.
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I am writing a PC application that will connect with TCP to multiple micro-controller boards. The micro-controller boards are listening and the PC app connecting to each of them as a client.
There can be up to up to about 50 boards depending on configuration, and it is not clear to me if it is best to create all these sockets as blocking in individual threads waiting at recv() or make the sockets non-blocking and use select() to check for incoming data one socket at the time.
So is up to 50 threads of blocking recv() OK, or is it better to check one socket at the time with select()?
Info: Data is almost entirely coming from the micro-controller boards and the rate can vary from essentially nothing to max. of the network.
Thanks...
I know that a server normally open one port and listen it.
Today I learnt that there was a function select in system Unix-Like. With select we can listen multi-sockets.
I just can't imagine a case where we need to use select. If we have two sockets, it means that we are listening two ports, right? So I have a question:
What kind of server would open more than one port but receive and process the same type of requests?
Using select helps with handling reads and writes on multiple sockets. It doesn't have to be multiple server sockets. The most typical use is for multiplexing a large number of client sockets.
You have a server with one listening socket. Each time you accept a connection, you add the new client socket to the multiplexing pool. select then returns any time any of those sockets has data available to read. The big win is that you're doing all this with one thread.
You also get as socket for each connection that you've accepted on the listening (server) socket.
selecting among these (client) sockets and the server socket (readable => new connection) allows you to write apps such as chat servers efficiently.
Ummm... remember the difference between ports and sockets.
A "port" is like a telephone-number. But a single phone-number could be handling any number of "calls!"
A "socket," then, represents a single telephone-call: a currently active connection between this server and a particular client. Each connection, by definition, "takes place over a particular port," but any number of connections might exist at the same time.
(The "accept" operation corresponds to: picking up the phone.)
So, then, what select() buys you is the ability to monitor any number of sockets at one time. It examines all the sockets, waits (if necessary) for something to happen on any one of them, and returns one message to you. Now, the design of your server becomes "a simple loop." No matter how many sockets you're listening to, and no matter how many of them have messages waiting, select() will return messages to you one at a time.
It's basically the case that "every server out there will use a select() loop at its heart, unless there's an exceptionally wonderful reason not to.
Take a look here:
One traditional way to write network servers is to have the main
server block on accept(), waiting for a connection. Once a connection
comes in, the server fork()s, the child process handles the connection
and the main server is able to service new incoming requests.
With select(), instead of having a process for each request, there is
usually only one process that "multi-plexes" all requests, servicing
each request as much as it can.
So one main advantage of using select() is that your server will only
require a single process to handle all requests. Thus, your server
will not need shared memory or synchronization primitives for
different 'tasks' to communicate.
One major disadvantage of using select(), is that your server cannot
act like there's only one client, like with a fork()'ing solution. For
example, with a fork()'ing solution, after the server fork()s, the
child process works with the client as if there was only one client in
the universe -- the child does not have to worry about new incoming
connections or the existence of other sockets. With select(), the
programming isn't as transparent.
http://www.lowtek.com/sockets/select.html
I am currently attempting to connect to multiple BLE devices using BlueZ 5.0 and Linux. I have one host BLE adapter and I have modified the gatttool to connect and perform this function. If I run an instance of the modified gatttool, I successfully connect and receive notification data from the BLE device. If I run another instance of the modified gatttool and connect to another BLE device, this application starts receiving notification data from both BLE devices and the initial application no longer receives any data. I believe this is due to the socket setup, where both applications are configuring their sockets to the same address and PSM (the newest instance receives the data whereas the other is starved). Is there a way to prevent this condition? Ideally, I want one application to connect to multiple devices. I assume that the application can only have one socket for the reason that multiple sockets will have the same issue as the multiple instances above. My BLE device is a TI CC2540 keyfob acting as a heartrate monitor.
I started an answer so I could have more space...
I'm using a combination of Python and C to get my code to work, so my "code" may look funny because it could be from either. Also, I used Bluez 4 as the 5 didn't support the kernel I was using. Let me know if there's an issue and I can clarify.
It seems like there's several ways of doing things, but I ended up opening separate sockets for different tasks. You can open a single socket and then set the socket options to take filtering off and you should get all the packets in one place. However, that was my initial way of doing it and I found that my connections would die within seconds.
To scan for connections I opened a socket(AF_BLUETOOTH, SOCK_RAW, BTPROTO_HCI) then did a bind on device 0. (there's a function called hci_get_route to get an available device number) You can then call hci_le_set_scan_parameters to set options, setsockopt(SOL_HCI, HCI_FILTER, filter) to just get LE scan events, and then called hci_le_set_scan_enable to turn on scanning.
Each device connection was made with a socket(AF_BLUETOOTH, SOCK_SEQPACKET, BTPROTO_L2CAP) which you then tell to connect to a particular device by calling connect on the socket with a struct sockaddr_l2 that has the particular device address in it. On that socket you should only get packets from that device. (one caveat... I found that my dongle wouldn't allow a connection while active scanning was taking place.. I had to temporarily shut it off just before connecting and then turn it back on. Otherwise I got a BUSY error from errno)
After saying all that, though... I think the way you're supposed to do everything in Bluez 5 is to use DBUS. Unfortunately that wasn't really an option for what I was doing. The functions I mentioned are in the shared lib that apparently isn't installed by default in 5 (you have to explicitly ask for it to be installed with configure). They stopped installing the shared lib by default because they wanted to encourage people to use DBUS instead.
WE have combined the code from hcitool and gatttool. The code works well for 2 device (scan, hci_le_create_conn and gatt_connect). I believe there is no limitation on the number of devices used.
1 Start cmd_lescan (from hcitool.c)
2.For each device scanned -
cmd_lecc (from hcitool.c)
gatt_connect (from gatttool.c)
This way one process can manage multiple BLE device. We do not have to turn OFF the scanning, just have ignore non advertisement messages:
if (meta->subevent != 0x02)
continue;
Thanks and looking forward to comments.
I am learning Linux internals. So I came across the poll system call. As far as I understand, it is used by drivers to provide notification when some data is ready to be read from device and when we have data ready to device.
If device do not have any data to read, process will get sleep and wake up when data become available and vice versa for write case.
Can someone provide me concrete understanding of poll system call with some real example?
poll and select (the latter is very similar to poll with these differences) sys calls are used in so called asynchronous event-driven approach for handling client's requests.
Basically, in network programming there are two major strategies for handling many connections from network clients by the server:
1) more traditional: threaded or process-oriented approach. In this situation network server has main proccess which listens on one specific network port (port 80 in case of web servers) for incomming connections and when connection arrives, it spawns new thread/process to handle this new connection. Apache HTTP server took this approch.
2) aforementioned asynchronous event-driven approach where (in simplest case) network server (for example web server) is application with only one process and it accepts connections (creating socket for each new client) and then it monitors those sockets with poll/select for incoming data. Nginx http web server took this approch.
assume we have an application which uses winsock to implement tcp communication.
for each socket we create a thread and block-receiving on it.
when data arrives, we would like to notify other threads (listening threads).
i was wondering what is the best way to implement this:
move away from this design and use a non-blocking socket, then the listening thread will have to iterate constantly and call a non-blocking receive, thus making it thread safe (no extra threads for the sockets)
use asynchronous procedure calls to notify listening threads - which again will have to alert-wait for apc to queue for them.
implement some thread safe message queue, where each socket thread will post messages to it, and the listener, again, will go over it every interval and pull data from it.
also, i read about WSAAsyncSelect, but i saw that this is used to send messages to a window. isnt there something similar for other threads? (well i guess apcs are...)
Thanks!
Use I/O completion ports. See the CreateIoCompletionPort() and the GetQueuedCompletionStatus() functions of the Win32 API (under File Management functions). In this instance, the socket descriptors are used in place of file handles.
You'll always be better off abstracting the mechanics of socket API (listening, accepting, reading & writing) in a separate layer from the application logic. Have an object that captures the state of a connection, which is created during an incoming connection and you can maintain buffers in this object for the incoming and outgoing traffic. This will allow your network interface layer to be independent of the application code. This will also make the code cleaner by separating the application functionality from the underlying communication mechanism.
Blocking or non-blocking socket decision depends on the level of scalability that your applications needs to achieve. If your application needs to support hundreds of incoming connections, adopting a thread-per-socket approach is not going to be very wise. You'll be better off going for an Io ports based implementation, which will make your app immensely scaleable at added code complexity. However, if you only foresee a few 10s of connections at any point in time, you can go for an asynchronous sockets model using Win32 events or messages. Win32 events based approach doesn't scale very well beyond a certain limit as you would have to manage multiple threads if the number of concurrent sockets exceed 63 (as WaitForMultipleObjects can only support a max of 64 sockets). Windows message based mechanism doesn't have this limitation though. OHOH, Win32 event based approach does not require a GUI window to work.
Check out WSAEventSelect along with WSAAsyncSelect API documentation in MSDN.
You might want to take a look at boost::asio package as well. It provides a neat (though a little complex) C++ abstraction over sockets API.