Re: sandbox timers & block scopes

On 8/16/06, Francis Cianfrocca <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure if I'm about to repeat what Charles has already said, but
> how about you add a structure inside the interpreter loop that gets a
> value added to it whenever a timed sandbox starts up (and removed
> whenever it completes)? There can be multiple sandbox timeouts active
> at a time, so you can do this from multiple green threads. The
> structure contains the real time at which each timeout expires, and
> the associated thread descriptor. Add something to the interpreter
> loop that runs down the expired timeouts every time through, and
> raises a Ruby exception to each expiring sandbox. It's heavyweight
> because of the kernel-lock needed to check the time but maybe Ruby is
> already doing that somewhere else.


This is basically the same, yes...but I think we're both on the right track.
There are already hooks in the interpreter "loop" to check whether a thread
context switch has been requested, and the sandbox is really just a special
case of green threads. Overloading that feature to monitor sandbox
runtime--especially if per-sandbox threading is disabled for such
scenarios--should be very easy to do (and it works across platforms, of
course, since the threading-signaling code is already there).

-- 
Contribute to RubySpec! @ www.headius.com/rubyspec
Charles Oliver Nutter @ headius.blogspot.com
Ruby User @ ruby.mn
JRuby Developer @ www.jruby.org
Application Architect @ www.ventera.com