p9p

Overview ¶

Package p9p implements a compliant 9P2000 client and server library for use in modern, production Go services. This package differentiates itself in that is has departed from the plan 9 implementation primitives and better follows idiomatic Go style.

The package revolves around the session type, which is an enumeration of raw 9p message calls. A few calls, such as flush and version, have been elided, defering their usage to the server implementation. Sessions can be trivially proxied through clients and servers.

Getting Started ¶

The best place to get started is with Serve. Serve can be provided a connection and a handler. A typical implementation will call Serve as part of a listen/accept loop. As each network connection is created, Serve can be called with a handler for the specific connection. The handler can be implemented with a Session via the Dispatch function or can generate sessions for dispatch in response to client messages. (See cmd/9ps for an example)

On the client side, NewSession provides a 9p session from a connection. After a version negotiation, methods can be called on the session, in parallel, and calls will be sent over the connection. Call timeouts can be controlled via the context provided to each method call.

Framework ¶

This package has the beginning of a nice client-server framework for working with 9p. Some of the abstractions aren't entirely fleshed out, but most of this can center around the Handler.

Missing from this are a number of tools for implementing 9p servers. The most glaring are directory read and walk helpers. Other, more complex additions might be a system to manage in memory filesystem trees that expose multi-user sessions.

Differences ¶

The largest difference between this package and other 9p packages is simplification of the types needed to implement a server. To avoid confusing bugs and odd behavior, the components are separated by each level of the protocol. One example is that requests and responses are separated and they no longer hold mutable state. This means that framing, transport management, encoding, and dispatching are componentized. Little work will be required to swap out encodings, transports or connection implementations.

Context Integration ¶

This package has been wired from top to bottom to support context-based resource management. Everything from startup to shutdown can have timeouts using contexts. Not all close methods are fully in place, but we are very close to having controlled, predictable cleanup for both servers and clients. Timeouts can be very granular or very course, depending on the context of the timeout. For example, it is very easy to set a short timeout for a stat call but a long timeout for reading data.

Multiversion Support ¶

Currently, there is not multiversion support. The hooks and functionality are in place to add multi-version support. Generally, the correct space to do this is in the codec. Types, such as Dir, simply need to be extended to support the possibility of extra fields.

The real question to ask here is what is the role of the version number in the 9p protocol. It really comes down to the level of support required. Do we just need it at the protocol level, or do handlers and sessions need to be have differently based on negotiated versions?

Caveats ¶

This package has a number of TODOs to make it easier to use. Most of the existing code provides a solid base to work from. Don't be discouraged by the sawdust.

In addition, the testing is embarassingly lacking. With time, we can get full testing going and ensure we have confidence in the implementation.