[zeromq-dev] Pluggable Transport Protocol

[Pieter Hintjens]

Hi Michael,

This sounds great. My advice is to make small steps, solving one
problem at a time, rather than aiming for ideal solutions. I'd love to
see compile-time pluggable protocols come onto master, and be used,
before we think about making this a runtime thing. Keep things simple,
don't solve problems we don't have (yet).

-Pieter

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Michael Holmwood <mholmwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings All,
>
> I am currently involved in a project that aims to add SCTP as a transport
> protocol to ØMQ. So far, we have managed to get SCTP working fine, we just
> needed to add the ability to modify heart beat and add addresses for
> multi-homing. The multi-streaming part is going to be the most difficult,
> but I don't think we will be having any problems adding this.
>
> Back in February, I recall a message that was posted on the mailing list
> regarding pluggable transport protocols. Having spent some time looking at
> the ØMQ source code, I determined that I could add this without too much
> trouble. So we have made some of the necessary changes, and have both SCTP
> and TCP working as pluggable protocols, with TCP being the default option.
> We have tested the performance with pluggable and non-pluggable (with TCP)
> and noticed no difference.
>
> At the moment, there is no way to add protocols after ØMQ is compiled, which
> is the next thing we needed to look at. We have considered a few options:
>
> 1) Leave it the way it is, having protocols only added when ØMQ is compiled.
> I have seen something similar used in the UDT library, but this was with
> pluggable congestion control algorithms. http://udt.sourceforge.net/
>
> 2) Provide something in the API to enable protocols to be added using shared
> libraries.
>
> 3) Provide a mechanism to register new protocols via the API using factory
> objects/functions.
>
> I am quite keen on option 3, however it would be good if I could get some
> input from the community before proceeding. One thing to note is that it
> only currently works with Linux, as this is what our client has requested,
> but would look at modifying the code to work with both.
>
> The interface that I have created requires that the protocols be added using
> classes created in C++, so I guess I might have to look at modifying it to
> work with C or provide a mechanism to provide the appropriate functions
> using pointers.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael Holmwood.
>
>
>
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