nova team mailing list archive

[Soren Hansen <soren.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 03:19:26PM -0500, Justin Santa Barbara wrote:
> A) Do I change the interface so that the method returns a deferred
> even in the providers that are synchronous?  If so, we should just
> have all interfaces return a deferred on all methods, so that the
> interface doesn't expose the implementation.  However, this would make
> everything messy...

The fact that e.g. libvirt.get_info() is synchronous is, IMO, a bug. It
calls out to libvirt and hangs the entire process until libvirt decides
to respond. Until libvirt becomes async itself, we need make these calls
in a separate thread or process so that we can carry on while waiting
for libvirt to get back to us.

> B) Should I type-check the result of the call and synchronously wait
> on it if it is deferred?

As Vish pointed out, that's what maybeDeferred is for.

> (And can anyone point me at some code that can do a sync-wait?)

Using standard Twisted, no. I doubt it's possible. You need threads or
coroutines or something to pull that off and Twisted uses neither.

> As an aside, and to borrow from the Wizard of Oz, "Twisted, I've a
> feeling we're not in Python any more".  Every method is preceded by
> @defer.inlineCallbacks, return x becomes returnValue(x), and there are
> yields scattered throughout the code based on whether the called
> method returns a deferred or not.

Yup. inlineCallbacks is a bit of an acquired taste. I'm not entirely
there yet myself.

> Perhaps we can clarify the Twisted vs Eventlet discussion: would
> Eventlet solve this particular problem?

The inlineCallbacks thing? Yes. The libvirt thing? Not as far as I know.
eventlet has this patching mechanism, but as I understand it, it relies
on the particular module using Python's socket module to work, which
python-libvirt doesn't, AFAIK.

-- 
Soren Hansen
Systems Architect
The Rackspace Cloud