Namespaced IO Layer

Introduction

The Haskell I/O library is based on the underlying Unix/Posix concepts, repeating its well-known design specifics and inconsistencies. The namespaced IO library provides an IO abstraction based on the ideas found in Plan 9 and Inferno, that is, to represent each IO capable resource as a virtual file server exposing a tree of files and directories, organizing those trees using per-process configurable namespaces.

Availability

Project summary (licensing, etc.): http://code.google.com/p/hs-ogl-misc/

Source code: http://code.google.com/p/hs-ogl-misc/source/browse/ under the io-layer directory.

Checkout: see http://code.google.com/p/hs-ogl-misc/source/checkout (Mercurial repo)

Structure

Base Layer

This layer is represented by the Haskell (GHC) own IO library (the IO Monad). Handles provided by the standard library are used to perform actual IO operations.

Device Layer

This layer contains servers providing file operations to access the resources represented by the Base Layer. These operations are not directly available to applications.

File servers defined within this layer expose an interface that resembles the interface of a Plan9 kernel-level driver. The set of operations implemented by such servers is close to 9P2000 set of operations, but the implementation has been adjusted for more convenient implementation.

Attaching to a Device

This operation corresponds to the ATTACH operation of 9P2000. Its purpose is to establish a relationship between an application process and a portion of the filesystem that the device exposes. The result of this operation is so called Attachment Descriptor for the root of the filesystem exposed by the device.

Attachment Descriptor roughly corresponds to the Chan structure that Plan9 kernel maintains for each process-device attachment. The most important parts of this structure are:

• Qid (same as 9P2000 Qid) which holds the internal reference to a file or a directory served by the attached device.
• Attachment privileges which tell the device which files may be accessed through this attachment descriptor, and in which fashion. Attachment privileges may in some cases differ from the running privileges of an application process: thus a non-privileged process may have higher access levels with certain devices.
• Path to the file or directory from the fevice's filesystem root.

Walking the File System Tree

This operation corresponds to the WALK operation of 9P2000. Its purpose is to obtain an attachment descriptor for a file or directory (tatget of the walk) other than the one an application process has an attachment descriptor for (start of the walk). While a successful device attachment operation results in an attachment descriptor for a device filesystem root, in order to reach an arbitrary file or a directory down the filesystem tree, one or more walk operations need to be performed. Basically one step of filesystem walk includes search of an entry with the given name (one component of the target path) in the directory related to the given attachment descriptor (walk on a regular file is not allowed). If the search was successful, the next component of the target path is searched for in the directory found at the previous step, etc. until all the target path components are processed, or any kind of error (entry not found, access violation, IO error etc.). The result of the walk operation is an Attachment Descriptior for the target path. The target Attachment Descriptor will likely contain the same attachment privileges that the start Attachment Descriptor contains.

Opening a Handle

This operation corresponds to the OPEN operation of 9P2000. Given an Attachment Descriptor for a file or a directory, and IO mode (read, write, append, etc.) requested, a Handle will be opened by the means of the underlying Haskell (GHC) runtime. To read/write/seek/close a Handle, use the standard Haskell library interface.

Namespace Layer

This layer provides facilities to organize file systems presented by the Device Layer into per-process (thread) namespaces. Operations such as binding a file system to a namespace, and path evaluation are directly available to applications.

Application Layer

This layer implements streaming IO operations using the Iteratee concept.

DRAFT! DRAFT! DRAFT!

This document as well as the library it describes are both work in progress and subject to changes of any unpredictable kind ;)