GSoC 2020 Final Report: Improving and Extending Services Kit

Blog post by leorize on Mon, 2020-08-31 02:00
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Hi all. This is my final report on my project aiming to improve Services Kit, the networking backend behind most native Haiku application, most notably WebPositive.

Progress made during GSoC

You may find the patches here:

Here’s the summary of some of the outstanding changes:

  • BMemoryRingIO is introduced for high-speed cross-thread communication. This is an implemenation of a circular buffer with BDataIO interface. The intended use case for this is for a HTTP/2 implementation, where one thread will be the multiplexer and request threads will make use of this to retrieve from the multiplexer.
  • BUrlRequest will now output directly into a BDataIO. This simplifies the API for users as they can now reuse BDataIO implementations within Haiku like BFile, BMallocIO, etc. without having to implement a BUrlProtocolListener.
  • Introducing BUrlSession as a context manager allowing request handlers to access and store session data. What this will enable is the ability to reuse previously opened connections, which should reduce latency when requests are opened against previously connected hosts. This portion is still a WIP.
  • A clean up and rearchitecture of HaikuWebKit (WebPositive’s engine) networking was done which should improve reliablity. The rearchitecture also come with fixes for HTTP authentication and redirection, which should now function as well as other browsers.

I’ll be honest, I’m not happy with (relatively) small the amount of work that I have done during this GSoC, and I’m sorry for have not followed up with my set goals.

What’s next?

I’ll continue to refine the changes as needed and potentially work on some optimizations like connection reuse that will be made possible by the changes done, but with my withering interest on this project, I can’t promise anything.

Program experience

I’ve learned a lot working on this project, especially about how much I still don’t know about thread-safety, and I got to experience first hand the need for the many modern C++ features that I’ve come to take for granted (Services Kit has to be written in C++98 for gcc2 support).

Regarding the mentorship, I have to thank waddlesplash and PulkoMandy for being very patient with my slow work pace, and for the helpful advices as well as the quick turnaround for all of my questions.


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