Adding Thread Safety to the X Go Binding



The X Go Binding (XGB) is a low level library that provides an API to interact with running X servers. One can only communicate with an X server by sending data over a network connection; protocol requests, replies and errors need to be perfectly constructed down to the last byte. Xlib did precisely this, and then some. As a result, Xlib became huge and difficult to maintain.

In recent years, the XCB project made things a bit more civilized by generating C code from XML files describing the X client protocol using Python. While the Python to generate said code is no walk in the park, it is typically preferred to the alternative: keeping the X core protocol up to date along with any number of extensions that exist as well. (There are other benefits to XCB, like easier asynchronicity, but that is beyond the scope of this post.)

XGB proceeds in a similar vain; Python is used to generate Go code that provides an API to interact with the X protocol. Unlike its sister project XCB, it is not thread safe. In particular, if X requests are made in parallel, the best case scenario is a jumbled request or reply and the worst case scenario is an X server crash. Parallel requests can be particularly useful when images are being sent to the X server to be painted on the screen; other useful work could be done in the interim.

For example, in Wingo (a window manager written purely in Go; still in development), it would be great to do something like this when first managing a client:

func manage ( windowId xgb . Id ) { go func () { // load window icon images // and turn them into X pixmaps }() // the rest of the code to manage a client }

Assuming GOMAXPROCS has been set appropriately, this would allow Wingo to show and map a window without regard to the time required to prep images associated with each client. (i.e., icons, images containing the title of the window, alt-tab cylcing icons, etc.) Such parallelism is particularly useful when the user has configured Wingo to use large images—which noticeably results in lag when first managing a window. Without thread safety in XGB, this sort of parallelism is impossible. Since drawing images to X windows is a common task, parallelism can be particularly useful. Thus, thread safety in XGB—being the only barrier to this sort of parallelism—is certainly desirable.

This is a perfect opportunity for Go to shine. But before we get into the juicy tidbits, I must discuss a few low-level and nasty details of X.

As said previously, we communicate with X over a network connection. As a client, we send requests and we read replies, events and errors. In particular, replies, events and errors all come to us on the same wire—XGB must deduce which kind of thing its reading by looking at the value of the first byte of each 32 byte block. (Sometimes replies can be longer than 32 bytes, but we can safely skip over that detail for this post.)

On a conceptual level, events are inherently separate from replies and errors. In particular, when a request expects a response (not all requests do!), it will either get a reply or an error from X. Thus, when issuing a request that expects a response, we are implicitly creating a contract with the X server that we’ll receive something corresponding to that request. We will revisit this response contract later; remember it!

(In this post, I’ll be focusing on the thread safety of receiving responses. Some amount of work also had to be done to ensure thread safe writing and reading of events—among other things. But the thread safety of receiving responses is much more interesting.)

You may be wondering: how do requests and responses match up? Both X and XGB keep track of how many requests have been sent. Each request we send, therefore, has a unique serial identifier associated with it. This identifier is also known as a cookie—and it’s included in every single reply and error sent to us from the X server. Therefore, whenever we send a request that expects a response, we need some way to store the cookie so we know when we’ve received the response (which will either be a reply or an error). Naively, this could be a simple map from cookie identifiers to responses. Here are the types:

type Cookies map [ uint16 ] * Response type Response struct { reply [] byte err error }

The types say that we have a map of cookie identifiers (unsigned 16-bit integers) to responses—where responses are either a reply (some slice of bytes) or an error. We could then populate this map by reading from our X connection with something like (excuse some pseudo code to keep it brief):

cookies := make ( Cookies ) go func () { for { io . ReadFull ( xConn , responseBytes ) cookieId := getCookieFromBytes ( responseBytes ) if _ , ok := cookies [ cookieId ]; ok { if responseBytes is reply { cookies [ cookieId ] = & Response { reply : responseBytes } } else if responseBytes is error { cookies [ cookieId ] = & Response { err : errorFromBytes ( responseBytes )} } else { panic ( "unreachable" ) } } else { panic ( "Got unexpected response" ) } } }()

But now what? If we’re waiting for a particular reply (i.e., with some particular cookie identifier), we could try something like:

func WaitForReply ( cookieId uint16 ) * Response { for { if response , ok := cookies [ cookieId ]; ok { return response } time . Sleep ( ??? ) } }

But how much time should we wait between checks? If it’s too short, we’ll end up spinning and if it’s too long we’ll be blocking when we should be handling a response.

The underlying problem here is that replies may not come in the order that we need them. We can’t wait on a single channel for responses to come in, because we may be waiting for more than one reply and we can’t be sure of the order they’ll arrive in.

Another way to think about this problem is in terms of the response contract I mentioned earlier. The response contract is quite specific: whenever a request is sent that expects a response (we know which requests expect a response ahead of time), it must get either a reply or an error from the X server.

This is a perfect situation for goroutines and channels. Instead of thinking about the cookie as some identifier yielding a response, we can think about a cookie as an identifier with a “promise” it will return either a reply or an error in the future. That “promise” can be represented as a pair of channels: one channel gets a reply and the other gets an error. Let’s revisit our types:

type Cookies map [ uint16 ] * Cookie type Cookie struct { replyChan make ( chan [] byte , 1 ) errChan make ( chan error , 1 ) }

So that replyChan and errChan are the pieces that will fulfill the cookie’s promise (they are buffered so they don’t block the X read loop). The promise is fullfilled in the code that reads from the X connection. Instead of creating a response that has either a reply or an error, we can use the cookie’s channels to send either a reply or an error. Only two lines need changing:

cookies := make ( Cookies ) go func () { for { io . ReadFull ( xConn , responseBytes ) cookieId := getCookieFromBytes ( responseBytes ) if cookie , ok := cookies [ cookieId ]; ok { if responseBytes is reply { -- > cookie . replyChan <- responseBytes } else if responseBytes is error { -- > cookie . errChan <- errorFromBytes ( responseBytes ) } else { panic ( "unreachable" ) } } else { panic ( "Got unexpected response" ) } } }()

Our WaitForReply code also becomes much better, and will always do just the right amount of blocking:

func WaitForReply ( cookie * Cookie ) ([] byte , error ) { select { case reply := <- cookie . replyChan : return reply , nil case err := <- cookie . errChan : return nil , err } panic ( "unreachable" ) }

So that we now have thread safe—and parallel—responses.

You can find my work in a clone of XGB called jamslam-x-go-binding. In addition to thead safety, several bugs have been fixed (most notably with using ChangeProperty on 32 bit values) and support for the Xinerama extension has been added. Support for other extensions is on the roadmap.

Any comments or criticisms on my approach are greatly appreciated.