pthreads at bmcweb

[Sunitha Harish]

Thanks Milton for sharing your views.

Awaiting more inputs/feedbacks from the community.

Regards,
Sunitha

On 06-01-2021 23:42, Milton Miller II wrote:
> On Jan 6, 2021 Sunitha Harish wrote:
>>      Hi team,
>>      Reference commit
>> https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/c/openbmc/bmcweb/+/31735 :
>>      In order to handle the multiple push-style event subscribers,
>> bmc       needs to support the async resolution of the subscribers
>> address.       The async_resolve() API crashes if there is no thread
>> support in       the binary.
>>      I created a bmcweb binary patch by pulling this commit and
>> including the pthread. This works fine for the use-cases, but
>> increased the bmcweb binary size by 220KB.
> ?
>>      Ed's suggestion is not to use the pthreads, instead implement
>> alternatives to do the same job, so that the binary size is kept
>> minimum. He mentioned: "Considering that's a ~30% increase in binary
>> size to support one line off code, and most systems are already at
>> their binary size limit, no, that's not going to be acceptable. We
>> can either patch boost to use this
>> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/getaddrinfo_a.3.html or we
>> could build our own resolver type that calls that underneath.  This
>> was based on a quick lookthrough of solutions in Google.  I'm open to
>> other ideas here".
>>      I am looking for the community views about the increased bmcweb
>>      binary size v/s having a custom implementation for asyc_resolve.
>>       Please share your views & ideas to get to the best solution.
> I agree with Ed that adding pthreads is a step that should be taken
> with a lot of caution.   In addition to the binary size, a threaded
> application also adds security audit concerns.
>
> A quick search with the query of "dns lookup library embedded" found
> a possible library with a probably compatible license (although last
> update was 4 years ago), and the second link was a survey of other
> client and server packages that could be investigated.
>
> My personal opinion only.
>
> milton
>