SPDK provides a framework for writing asynchronous, polled-mode, shared-nothing server applications. The event framework is intended to be optional; most other SPDK components are designed to be integrated into an application without specifically depending on the SPDK event library. The framework defines several concepts - reactors, events, and pollers - that are described in the following sections. The event framework spawns one thread per core (reactor) and connects the threads with lockless queues. Messages (events) can then be passed between the threads. On modern CPU architectures, message passing is often much faster than traditional locking. For a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of this framework, see Message Passing and Concurrency.
The event framework public interface is defined in event.h.
Simple server applications can be written in a single-threaded fashion. This allows for straightforward code that can maintain state without any locking or other synchronization. However, to scale up (for example, to allow more simultaneous connections), the application may need to use multiple threads. In the ideal case where each connection is independent from all other connections, the application can be scaled by creating additional threads and assigning connections to them without introducing cross-thread synchronization. Unfortunately, in many real-world cases, the connections are not entirely independent and cross-thread shared state is necessary. SPDK provides an event framework to help solve this problem.
To accomplish cross-thread communication while minimizing synchronization overhead, the framework provides message passing in the form of events. The event framework runs one event loop thread per CPU core. These threads are called reactors, and their main responsibility is to process incoming events from a queue. Each event consists of a bundled function pointer and its arguments, destined for a particular CPU core. Events are created using spdk_event_allocate() and executed using spdk_event_call(). Unlike a thread-per-connection server design, which achieves concurrency by depending on the operating system to schedule many threads issuing blocking I/O onto a limited number of cores, the event-driven model requires use of explicitly asynchronous operations to achieve concurrency. Asynchronous I/O may be issued with a non-blocking function call, and completion is typically signaled using a callback function.
Each reactor has a lock-free queue for incoming events to that core, and threads from any core may insert events into the queue of any other core. The reactor loop running on each core checks for incoming events and executes them in first-in, first-out order as they are received. Event functions should never block and should preferably execute very quickly, since they are called directly from the event loop on the destination core.
The framework also defines another type of function called a poller. Pollers may be registered with the spdk_poller_register() function. Pollers, like events, are functions with arguments that can be bundled and executed. However, unlike events, pollers are executed repeatedly until unregistered and are executed on the thread they are registered on. The reactor event loop intersperses calls to the pollers with other event processing. Pollers are intended to poll hardware as a replacement for interrupts. Normally, pollers are executed on every iteration of the main event loop. Pollers may also be scheduled to execute periodically on a timer if low latency is not required.
The framework itself is bundled into a higher level abstraction called an "app". Once spdk_app_start() is called, it will block the current thread until the application terminates by calling spdk_app_stop() or an error condition occurs during the initialization code within spdk_app_start(), itself, before invoking the caller's supplied function.
When creating SPDK based application user may add custom shutdown callback which will be called before the application framework starts the shutdown process. To do that set shutdown_cb function callback in spdk_app_opts structure passed to spdk_app_start(). Custom shutdown callback should call spdk_app_stop() before returning to continue application shutdown process.