Hi, I use the control port, or at least I'm trying to... But I can only use
and see the performance counters, I can never see the graphical
representation on the proves that I use, and that will be so useful for my
dissertation thesis.

On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 08:44, Müller, Marcus (CEL) <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Johannes!
>
> let me answer in-text real quick:
> On Mon, 2019-03-25 at 10:13 +0000, Johannes Demel wrote:
> > Hi Marcus,
> >
> > it seems like Thrift is a painful dependency. So, this is a pro
> > ctrlport
> > removal. Though, what else does ctrlport removal entail?
>
> Removal of Ctrlport and the tools dependent on it.
>
> > Is it really only used for monitoring and control?
>
> I'm only speaking for in-tree code, but yes.
> Speaking for the whole ecosystem: I'm by now aware of 1 (one) external
> project that uses CtrlPort. We're in contact.
>
> > Just for clarification, the zeromq blocks are not affected?
>
> Not affected.
>
> > How will the performance monitor be preserved?
>
> At this point, I have no clue. Suggestions welcome!
>
> >  I really like to look at
> > the statistics to get a first idea where to look for problems and
> > analyze my system with it.
>
> That's a fair point. But to be honest, you don't really need an RPC
> framework running in a separate process to query perfcounters, do you.
> A very valid model would be having a tiny perfcounter-server (e.g.
> behind a req/rep zeromq socket). It wouldn't be a general RPC
> framework, but it could do ctrlport's job for this very limited scope!
>
> >
> > Also, in case ctrlport is removed, we should have a GREP to discuss
> > what
> > we want and how we want ctrlport back in some other form.
>
> YESSSS! Want to (co)author that?
>
> Best regards,
> Marcus
>
> >
> > Cheers
> > Johannes
> >
> > Am 24.03.19 um 20:26 schrieb Marcus Müller:
> > > Dear GNU Radio community,
> > >
> > > we've got an outstanding breakage in our controlport
> > > infrastructure.
> > > Since fixing it seems to involve architectural changes to what
> > > controlport does, and since making these changes would quite
> > > possibly
> > > break the semantics of using controlport anyway, we're considering
> > > removing Controlport from the GNU Radio 3.8 release (this does NOT
> > > apply to 3.7).
> > >
> > > The negative effect of that would obviously be that we'd lose
> > > controlport (which I'm not going to introduce here; if you don't
> > > know
> > > what it is, you haven't been using it). We would *not* lose the
> > > performance counters, just the default way of querying them.
> > >
> > > The most important upside would be the ability to remove the Apache
> > > thrift dependency. Thrift has been the single worst thing we've
> > > relied
> > > on for as long as I can remember in terms of availability and
> > > consistency across platforms. In fact, different distros build
> > > completely different configurations of thrift, and noone seems to
> > > be
> > > able to build a "fully featured" thrift.
> > >
> > > Another aspect to this is that albeit controlport is pretty cool in
> > > theory – an adaptable RPC server within GNU Radio, with pluggable
> > > RPC
> > > backends – its adoption has been slow to say the least, and it
> > > doesn't
> > > really tie neatly into any GNU Radio applications I'd be aware of.
> > >
> > > So, lest someone fixes the bug (I'll be describing it below), I'd
> > > recommend we remove Controlport alltogether, and remove the thrift
> > > dependency. I still stand by the very idea of controlport – having
> > > RPC
> > > access to what a flow graph does – but in the end, there's a
> > > discussion
> > > that we need to have:
> > >
> > > How do we want to do RPC in a way that enables us to make GNU Radio
> > > far
> > > more machine-agnostic than it is? How does one not only allow for
> > > gathering of statistics and calling of functions, but build an RPC
> > > framework that makes heterogeneous and distributed GNU Radio really
> > > feasible?
> > >
> > > We've been addressing the question of what the scheduler needs to
> > > become at the heterogeneous compute working group at GRCon'18. To
> > > conclude, we need to get away from the "one buffer type fits all"
> > > and
> > > "all blocks are born equal and are just individual OS threads"
> > > towards
> > > domain-specific subschedulers and buffer managers. This is where
> > > this
> > > needs to tie in.
> > >
> > > Hence: Is anyone seriously using ControlPort and needs it for 3.8?
> > > Please raise a metaphorical hand on the mailing list or write a
> > > private
> > > one in response to this email.
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > > Marcus
> > >
> > > ----------------------------------
> > >
> > > Bug: clang correctly has been complaining for quite a while now
> > > that
> > > the RPCAggregator stores a reference to a temporary object. It
> > > seems
> > > that in the past this just worked by chance – probably, libc never
> > > really got around to reassign the memory of these temporary objects
> > > and
> > > all lived happily everafter. However, now on multiple platforms, we
> > > just see aborts in various tests due to access to freed memory.
> > > Probably memory protection just got smart enough to kick some sense
> > > into this code.
> > > All is fine as long as one doesn't actually use the code in
> > > question.
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > [email protected]
> > > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
> > >
> >
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