Hi all, A few weeks ago, we found serious issues with the current asynchronous IO implementation on Windows. The two eventing libraries in Mesos (libevent and libev) use `select` on Windows, which is socket-only on Windows. In fact, both of these libraries typedef their socket type as SOCKET, so passing in an arbitrary file handle should not even compile. Essentially, they aren't suitable for general purpose asynchronous IO on Windows.
This bug wasn't found earlier due to a number of reasons. Mesos has a `WindowsFD` class that multiplexes and demultiplexes the different Windows file types (HANDLE & SOCKET) into a singular type in order to work similar to UNIX platforms that use `int` for any type of file descriptor. Since WindowsFD is castable to a SOCKET, there were no compile errors for using HANDLES in libevent. Furthermore, none of the Windows HANDLEs were opened in asynchronous mode, so they were always blocking. This means that currently, any non-socket IO in Mesos blocks on Windows, so we never got runtime errors for sending arbitrary handles to libevent's event loop. Also, some of the unit tests that would catch this blocking behavior like in io_tests.cpp were disabled, so it was never caught in the unit tests. We wrote up a proposal on implementing asynchronous IO on Windows. The proposal is split into two parts that focus on stout and libprocess changes. The stout changes focus on opening and using asynchronous handles in the stout IO implementations. The libprocess changes focus on replacing libevent with another eventing library. We propose using the Windows Threadpool library, which is a native Win32 API that works like an event loop by allowing the user to schedule asynchronous events. Both Mesos and Windows uses the proactor IO pattern, so they map very cleanly. We prefer it over other asynchronous libraries like libuv and ASIO, since they have some issues mentioned in the design proposal like missing some features due to supporting older Windows versions. However, we understand the maintenance burden of adding another library, so we're looking for feedback on the design proposal. Link to JIRA issue: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MESOS-8668 Link to design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VG_8FTpWHiC7pKPoH4e-Yp7IFvAm-2wcFuk63lYByqo/edit?usp=sharing Thanks, Akash
