Hello,
I've been working on this patch to make apr and httpd work with SCTP streams.
Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP - RFC2960) is a transport layer
protocol capable of providing reliable (in-order, no loss, no duplicates,
no error) message oriented service to application.
Other interesting features of SCTP include multistreaming (many logical pipes
in 1 SCTP association to transfer independent data like web objects without
head of line blocking problem) and multihoming (ability to support more than
1 interface/IP address at a SCTP endpoint).
The idea was to enable httpd to receive HTTP request on a particular SCTP
stream and send the HTTP response on the same stream. Using different SCTP
streams for independent objects might improve performance (preventing HOL
as mentioned above).
apr-0.9.2 included recognition and support for SCTP from Randall Stewart.
I did my changes on top of this.
To give an outline of the implementation with the files involved:
APR:
o I created apr_socket_send_sctp and apr_socket_recv_sctp which take an
extra parameter - SCTP stream id. The recv function uses recvmsg function
call and gets the SCTP stream id on which the request came in. Similarly,
sendmsg call is used in apr_socket_send_sctp (sendrecv.c in
network_io/unix).
o I didnt want to change the signature of any other
function so I decided to use buckets to pass the stream id info to and
fro. The socket bucket read puts the stream id (from socket recv) in a
heap bucket and the caller takes the responsibility of retrieving this.
(apr_buckets_socket.c, apr_brigade.c).
HTTPD:
o core_input_filter retrieves and stores the stream id in a field in the
core_net_rec, which is used by core_output_filter->APR while sending
response.
o Also, I changed Listen directive to take the transport layer protocol
as an extra argument so that web admin can choose SCTP or TCP.
Currently, I have this patch working for httpd-2.0.55/apr-0.9.6.
Would appreciate any feedback,
Preethi
PS: Should I send this mail to apr dev mailing list as well or will that
be spamming?
