coroutine: introduce coroutines

Asynchronous code is becoming very complex.  At the same time
synchronous code is growing because it is convenient to write.
Sometimes duplicate code paths are even added, one synchronous and the
other asynchronous.  This patch introduces coroutines which allow code
that looks synchronous but is asynchronous under the covers.

A coroutine has its own stack and is therefore able to preserve state
across blocking operations, which traditionally require callback
functions and manual marshalling of parameters.

Creating and starting a coroutine is easy:

  coroutine = qemu_coroutine_create(my_coroutine);
  qemu_coroutine_enter(coroutine, my_data);

The coroutine then executes until it returns or yields:

  void coroutine_fn my_coroutine(void *opaque) {
      MyData *my_data = opaque;

      /* do some work */

      qemu_coroutine_yield();

      /* do some more work */
  }

Yielding switches control back to the caller of qemu_coroutine_enter().
This is typically used to switch back to the main thread's event loop
after issuing an asynchronous I/O request.  The request callback will
then invoke qemu_coroutine_enter() once more to switch back to the
coroutine.

Note that if coroutines are used only from threads which hold the global
mutex they will never execute concurrently.  This makes programming with
coroutines easier than with threads.  Race conditions cannot occur since
only one coroutine may be active at any time.  Other coroutines can only
run across yield.

This coroutines implementation is based on the gtk-vnc implementation
written by Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws> but it has been
significantly rewritten by Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com> to use
setjmp()/longjmp() instead of the more expensive swapcontext() and by
Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> for Windows Fibers support.

Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

1 files changed, 95 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/qemu-coroutine.h b/qemu-coroutine.h
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..08255c7c41
--- /dev/null
+++ b/qemu-coroutine.h
@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
+/*
+ * QEMU coroutine implementation
+ *
+ * Copyright IBM, Corp. 2011
+ *
+ * Authors:
+ *  Stefan Hajnoczi    <stefanha@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
+ *
+ * This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, version 2 or later.
+ * See the COPYING.LIB file in the top-level directory.
+ *
+ */
+
+#ifndef QEMU_COROUTINE_H
+#define QEMU_COROUTINE_H
+
+#include <stdbool.h>
+
+/**
+ * Coroutines are a mechanism for stack switching and can be used for
+ * cooperative userspace threading.  These functions provide a simple but
+ * useful flavor of coroutines that is suitable for writing sequential code,
+ * rather than callbacks, for operations that need to give up control while
+ * waiting for events to complete.
+ *
+ * These functions are re-entrant and may be used outside the global mutex.
+ */
+
+/**
+ * Mark a function that executes in coroutine context
+ *
+ * Functions that execute in coroutine context cannot be called directly from
+ * normal functions.  In the future it would be nice to enable compiler or
+ * static checker support for catching such errors.  This annotation might make
+ * it possible and in the meantime it serves as documentation.
+ *
+ * For example:
+ *
+ *   static void coroutine_fn foo(void) {
+ *       ....
+ *   }
+ */
+#define coroutine_fn
+
+typedef struct Coroutine Coroutine;
+
+/**
+ * Coroutine entry point
+ *
+ * When the coroutine is entered for the first time, opaque is passed in as an
+ * argument.
+ *
+ * When this function returns, the coroutine is destroyed automatically and
+ * execution continues in the caller who last entered the coroutine.
+ */
+typedef void coroutine_fn CoroutineEntry(void *opaque);
+
+/**
+ * Create a new coroutine
+ *
+ * Use qemu_coroutine_enter() to actually transfer control to the coroutine.
+ */
+Coroutine *qemu_coroutine_create(CoroutineEntry *entry);
+
+/**
+ * Transfer control to a coroutine
+ *
+ * The opaque argument is passed as the argument to the entry point when
+ * entering the coroutine for the first time.  It is subsequently ignored.
+ */
+void qemu_coroutine_enter(Coroutine *coroutine, void *opaque);
+
+/**
+ * Transfer control back to a coroutine's caller
+ *
+ * This function does not return until the coroutine is re-entered using
+ * qemu_coroutine_enter().
+ */
+void coroutine_fn qemu_coroutine_yield(void);
+
+/**
+ * Get the currently executing coroutine
+ */
+Coroutine *coroutine_fn qemu_coroutine_self(void);
+
+/**
+ * Return whether or not currently inside a coroutine
+ *
+ * This can be used to write functions that work both when in coroutine context
+ * and when not in coroutine context.  Note that such functions cannot use the
+ * coroutine_fn annotation since they work outside coroutine context.
+ */
+bool qemu_in_coroutine(void);
+
+#endif /* QEMU_COROUTINE_H */