Message Passing

Poplar has a kernel object called a Channel for providing first-class message passing support to userspace. Channels move packets, called "messages", which contain a stream of bytes, and optionally one or more handles that are transferred from the sending task to the receiving task.

Ptah

Channels can move arbitrary bytes, but Poplar also includes a layer on top of of Channels called Ptah, which consists of a data model and wire format suitable for encoding data which can be serialized and deserialized from any sensible language without too much difficulty.

Ptah is heavily inspired by Serde, and the first implementation of Ptah was actually a Serde data format. Unfortunately, it made properly handling Poplar handles very difficult - when a handle is sent over a channel, it needs to be put into a separate array, and the in-line data replaced by an index into that array. When the message travels over a task boundary, the kernel examines and replaces each handle in this array with a handle to the same kernel object in the new task. This effectively means we need to add a new Handle type to our data model, which is not easily possible with Serde (and would make it incompatible with standard Serde anyway).

The Ptah Data Model

The Ptah data model maps pretty well to the Rust type system, and relatively closely to the Serde data model. Key differences are some stronger guarantees about the encoding of types such as enums (the data model only needs to fit a single wire format, and so can afford to be less flexible than Serde's), and the lack of a few types - unit-based types, and the statically-sized version of seq and map - tuple and struct. Ptah is not a self-describing format (i.e. the types you're trying to deserialize is fully known), so the elements of structs and tuples can simply be serialized in the order they appear, and then deserialized in order at the other end.

• Primitive types
  • bool
  • u8, u16, u32, u64, u128
  • i8, i16, i32, i64, i128
  • f32, f64
  • char
• string
  • Encoded as a seq of u8, but with the additional requirement that it is valid UTF-8
  • Not null terminated, as seq includes explicit length
• option
  • Encoded in the same way as an enum, but separately for the benefit of languages without proper enums
  • Either None or Some({value})
• enum
  • Include a tag, and optionally some data
  • Represent a Rust enum, or a tagged union in languages without proper enums
  • The data is encoded separately to the tag, and can be of any other Ptah type:
    • Rust tuple variants (e.g. E::A(u8, u32)) are represented by tuple
    • Rust struct variants (e.g. E::B { foo: u8, bar: u32 }) are represented by struct
• seq
  • A variable-length sequence of values, mapping to many types such as Vec<T>.
• map
  • A variable-length series of key-value pairings, mapping to collections like BTreeMap<K, V>.
• handle
  • This is the type that means we need our own data model in the first place
  • These are encoded out-of-line of the rest of the data, so that the Poplar kernel can introspect into them, if it needs to