[Gluster-devel] Release 3.10 feature proposal:: Statedump for libgfapi

[Niels de Vos]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 06:20:22PM +0530, Rajesh Joseph wrote:
> Gluster should have some provision to take statedump of gfapi applications.
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1169302

A part of this feature should be to find out how applications that use
libgfapi expect to trigger debugging like this. Doing a statedump from
the gluster-cli should not be the main/only option. I agree that it
helps developers that work on Gluster, but we can not expect users to
trigger statedumps like that.

I think there would be a huge benefit in having an option to communicate
with libgfapi through some minimal form of local IPC. It will allow
doing statedumps, and maybe even set/get configuration options for
applications that do not offer these in their usage (yet).

The communication should be as simple and stable as possible. This could
be the only working interface towards getting something done inside
gfapi (worst case scenario). There is no need to have this a full
featured interface, possibly a named pipe (fifo) where libgfapi is the
reader is sufficient. A simple (text) command written to it can create
statedumps and eventually other files on request.

Enabling/disabling or even selecting the possibilities for debugging
could be confiured through new functions in libgfapi, and even
environment variables.

What do others think? Would this be useful?

Thanks,
Niels
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