Re: [hatari-devel] Control socket server

[tin@xxxxxxxxx]

Hi,

great, thanks! That makes it a lot easier to control Hataris debugger etc. from Sublime et al build systems.

The patch works fine on OSX and Windows has no fifo of course.

Needs a little tweak under windows to compile, though: in control.h a line like

#define Control_SetFifo(path) "Control fifo is not supported on this platform."

is missing for the #else part of #if HAVE_UNIX_DOMAIN_SOCKETS. Sorry, don't have a patch at hand.

Unfortunately Windows' CreateNamedPipe is nothing like mkfifo (aka totally easy), it's more along the lines of domain sockets. Windows now has AF_UNIX domain sockets in one of it's latest builds, but I don't know if they are available in older versions (probably not). So it's either named pipes or my TCP/IP listener patch to get cmd-fifo running on windows. We'll see.

Eero Tamminen

1. Mai 2018 um 16:31

Hi,

FIFO command support was easy enough that I already implemented it.

See the attached patch.

Could you test building the patch on OSX & Windows and see whether
it works correctly (supports this on OSX, doesn't on Windows)?

Usage:
$ rm cmd-fifo
$ hatari --confirm-quit off --cmd-fifo cmd-fifo &

$ echo "help" > cmd-fifo
$ echo "hatari-shortcut help" > cmd-fifo
$ echo "hatari-shortcut coldreset" > cmd-fifo
$ echo "hatari-shortcut quit" > cmd-fifo


    - Eero

Eero Tamminen

1. Mai 2018 um 15:45

Hi,

On 05/01/2018 02:29 PM, tin@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I have a question about the reasoning behind Hataris control sockets' need for an external dedicated server.

Is there any reason to not serve/create the socket in Hatari itself (other than additional complexity)? Is it planned to control more than one instance from one server?

If user accidentally quits Hatari instance which is running
inside Python GUI, GUI just starts a new instance of Hatari.

I.e. the original use-case for control socket was 1:N-hataris,
whereas you're more interested about N:1-hatari.

I'm currently playing with this and it seems a bit of a hassle to have every control application implementation set up a server (like e.g. the PythonUI does).

You don't need to re-implement it, just use hconsole.

You start your own code from the "example.py" in tools/hconsole/.


My current testbed is a dead simple edit&continue

workflow involving Sublime and an Hatari debug script (aka "magic").
To make things easier on the Editors side, I patched Hatari for OSX (domain socket) & Win (IP socket) to serve the connection. That way even a simple shell script can control Hatari nicely along the lines of echo+nc.

It would be nice to simplify the control sockets for users/developers - especially the "new" breed of text editors (Atom, Sublime, VSCode) lend themselves nicely to send commands to Hatari. Of course the extensions could spawn their own server, but it seems a bit of an overkill and adds another hurdle.

If you need just write-only way to give commands to Hatari,
you don't need a socket, a non-blocking FIFO file would be
enough for that (see "man fifo").

That should work both on OSX & Linux, but I don't know whether
Windows supports something like that?

If you try that out and provide tested patch taking the FIFO
path e.g. from environment variable, I can add rest of the
stuff needed (command line option, doc updates).


    - Eero

tin@xxxxxxxxx

1. Mai 2018 um 13:29

Hello all,

I have a question about the reasoning behind Hataris control sockets' need for an external dedicated server.

Is there any reason to not serve/create the socket in Hatari itself (other than additional complexity)? Is it planned to control more than one instance from one server?

I'm currently playing with this and it seems a bit of a hassle to have every control application implementation set up a server (like e.g. the PythonUI does). My current testbed is a dead simple edit&continue workflow involving Sublime and an Hatari debug script (aka "magic").
To make things easier on the Editors side, I patched Hatari for OSX (domain socket) & Win (IP socket) to serve the connection. That way even a simple shell script can control Hatari nicely along the lines of echo+nc.

It would be nice to simplify the control sockets for users/developers - especially the "new" breed of text editors (Atom, Sublime, VSCode) lend themselves nicely to send commands to Hatari. Of course the extensions could spawn their own server, but it seems a bit of an overkill and adds another hurdle.

Anything I'm missing?

Regards,
 tIn.