Non-blocking stdin support in WASI runtimes 🤔

This topic is a proceeding from Agda in WebAssembly & Experiments on Language Servers. I aim to study deeper on replicating POSIX I/O mechanism.

tl;dr, poll_oneoff for WASI preview 1 is difficult to get right. Will making stdin non-blocking help?

Let's see the following sample code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {
  printf("nonblock stdin before? %d\n", fcntl(0, F_GETFL) & O_NONBLOCK);

  if (fcntl(0, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK) < 0) {
    perror("fcntl");
  }

  printf("nonblock stdin after ? %d\n", fcntl(0, F_GETFL) & O_NONBLOCK);

  char buf[16];
  int n = read(0, buf, 1);
  printf("read ret=%d\n", n);
  if (n < 0)
    perror("read");
}

In WASI environment, we expect fcntl calls fd_fdstat_set_flags system call and (hopefully) turns on the non-blocking mode for stdin (fd=0). How will every environment handle this then?

Expected output

In a typical POSIX-compat system, the output will be:

$ gcc nonblock.c -o nonblock
$ ./nonblock
nonblock stdin before? 0
nonblock stdin after ? 4
read ret=-1
read: Resource temporarily unavailable

When stdin is set to non-blocking mode, the read sould immediately return with EAGAIN!

p.s. the return of fcntl(0, F_SETFL) is a mix of fd status flags and access mode flag, as explained in fcntl(3p). It might not be zero.

The survey

The most hassle-free way to get a working WASM module:

zig cc -target wasm32-wasi nonblock.c -o nonblock.wasm

• Node.js 20 🙆

But no direct CLI. You need to write some code to pull it off…

Grab this!

import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises'
import { WASI } from 'node:wasi'
const wasi = new WASI({
  version: 'preview1',
  args: ['nonblock.wasm'],
  env: {},
  returnOnExit: true,
})
const wasm = await WebAssembly.compile(
  await readFile('nonblock.wasm'),
)
const instance = await WebAssembly.instantiate(wasm, wasi.getImportObject())
process.exit(await wasi.start(instance))

• wasm3 🙆

Build: Nov 10 2022 09:50:46, Apple LLVM 14.0.0 (clang-1400.0.29.202)

• wazero 🙆

1.7.2

$ wazero run nonblock.wasm
nonblock stdin before? 0
nonblock stdin after ? 4
read ret=-1
read: Resource temporarily unavailable

Runtimes that do not pass this…

⚠️ means the read call blocks there, and you need to press Ctrl-D to escape.

wasmtime 🙅

wasmtime-cli 21.0.1 (cedf9aa0f 2024-05-22)

$ wasmtime run nonblock.wasm
nonblock stdin before? 0
fcntl: Bad file descriptor
nonblock stdin after ? 0
⚠️
read ret=0

Trace: (From my vague understanding of Rust code) See crates/wasi/src/preview1.rs for the function fd_fdstat_set_flags. A file object is some member of enum File. As you can see that stdin is defined as a different member, the operation to "get a File from fd" (get_file_mut) will lead to a BADF error:

match self.descriptors.get_mut(&fd) {
    Some(Descriptor::File(file)) => Ok(file),
    _ => Err(types::Errno::Badf.into()),
}

wasmer 🙅

wasmer 4.3.1

$ wasmer run nonblock.wasm
nonblock stdin before? 0
fcntl: Permission denied
nonblock stdin after ? 0
⚠️
read ret=0

Trace: "Permission denied" is more interesting. See function fd_fdstat_set_flags_internal. STDIN_DEFAULT_RIGHTS is hardcoded in lib/wasix/src/fs/mod.rs and it does not include FD_FDSTAT_SET_FLAGS. But adding that flag is not effective either:

$ target/release/wasmer nonblock.wasm
nonblock stdin before? 0
nonblock stdin after ? 0
⚠️
read ret=0

Problems observed:

1. The first fcntl succeeds, but the flag is not changed.
2. It is still blocking.

The attempt to fix Wasmer

Step 1: Make it possible to call fcntl

For 1., in the same file, the fdstat function always return flag 0.

    pub fn fdstat(&self, fd: WasiFd) -> Result<Fdstat, Errno> {
        match fd {
            __WASI_STDIN_FILENO => {
                return Ok(Fdstat {
                    fs_filetype: Filetype::CharacterDevice,
                    fs_flags: Fdflags::empty(),  // ⬅️
                    fs_rights_base: STDIN_DEFAULT_RIGHTS,
                    fs_rights_inheriting: Rights::empty(),
                })
            }
            ...

For 2., the write only saves the flag in memory, and does not acknowledge the system.

Let's patch them.

// wasmer/lib/wasix/src/fs/mod.rs

    pub fn fdstat(&self, fd: WasiFd) -> Result<Fdstat, Errno> {
        match fd {
            __WASI_STDIN_FILENO => {
                let fd = self.get_fd(fd)?;  // ✅
                return Ok(Fdstat {
                    fs_filetype: Filetype::CharacterDevice,
                    fs_flags: fd.flags,     // ✅
                    fs_rights_base: STDIN_DEFAULT_RIGHTS,
                    fs_rights_inheriting: Rights::empty(),
                })
              

// wasmer/lib/wasix/src/syscalls/wasi/fd_fdstat_set_flags.rs

#[instrument(level = "debug", skip_all, fields(%fd), ret)]
pub fn fd_fdstat_set_flags(
    // ...
) -> Result<Errno, WasiError> {
  
    // ...
  
    let guard = fd_entry.inode.read();

    let maybe_sys_fd = match guard.deref() {
        Kind::File { handle, .. } => {
            if let Some(handle) = handle {
                let handle = handle.clone();
                let handle = wasi_try_ok!(handle.read().map_err(|_| { Errno::Badf }));
                handle.get_special_fd()
            } else { None }
        },
        _ => None,
    };

    if let Some(sys_fd) = maybe_sys_fd {
        let sys_fd = wasi_try_ok!(i32::try_from(sys_fd).map_err(|_| { Errno::Badf }));
        let fcntl_flags = unsafe { libc::fcntl(sys_fd, libc::F_GETFL) };
        wasi_try_ok!((fcntl_flags >= 0).then(|| ()).ok_or(Errno::Access));

        let fcntl_flags = if flags.contains(Fdflags::NONBLOCK) {
            fcntl_flags | libc::O_NONBLOCK
        } else {
            fcntl_flags & (!libc::O_NONBLOCK)
        };

        let ret = unsafe { libc::fcntl(sys_fd, libc::F_SETFL, fcntl_flags) };
        wasi_try_ok!((ret == 0).then(|| ()).ok_or(Errno::Access));
    };
  
    // ...
  
    Ok(Errno::Success)
}

Step 2: Fix poll_oneoff accordingly

The above patch works well only for our example. It breaks apart as soon as our code involves poll_oneoff.

The blocking read from stdin issue is described in Tokio's documentation, as per https://docs.rs/tokio/latest/tokio/io/struct.Stdin.html:

This handle is best used for non-interactive uses, such as […] For interactive uses, it is recommended to spawn a thread dedicated to user input and use blocking IO directly in that thread.

With some strace-ing, I can almost conclude that Wasmer (tokio, and in turn mio) relies on the fact that stdin is blocking, and does not take advantage of any technique of I/O multiplexing (select/poll/epoll/…) for poll_oneoff, and so behaves unexpectedly in non-blocking mode. For instance,

// #include <sys/select.h>

int try_select() {
  fd_set readfds;
  FD_ZERO(&readfds);
  FD_SET(0, &readfds);

  // NOTE: passing NULL or a negative number in timeout 
  //       means waiting indefinitely!
  struct timeval timeout = {
    .tv_sec = 0,
    .tv_usec = 0,
  };
  return select(1, &readfds, NULL, NULL, &timeout);
}

It is surprising to see how Wasmer deviates from the spec…

Blocking?	Timeout	POSIX spec	Wasmer's behavior	Remark
Yes	NULL	Blocks	Blocks
Yes	{0, 0}	Returns 0	Blocks (*1)	This is trivial to fix by skipping s/g buffers of zero length.
No	NULL	Blocks	Returns 1 (*2)	This is hard to fix on Wasmer's side.
No	{0, 0}	Returns 0	Returns 1 (*2)	This corresponds to the demo code. The trace is provided below.

(*1): Wasmtime's behavior is correct. I believe this is another bug in Wasmer. The only correct way to tell poll_oneoff to wait indefinitely is to not include a clock event.
(*2): it errs out with EAGAIN (!); the readiness is set to EPOLLERR.

Read this section only if you are curious about the inner working...

Call try_select after setting O_NONBLOCK and compare the behavior in a UNIX system vs. in WASI runtime. UNIX returns 0 denoting that the read is not ready. On the other hand, the debug trace from Wasmer shows that poll_oneoff returns 1 when the underlying FD is set to non-blocking mode. A program seeing this will do the read and fail with EAGAIN.

The strace -ff shows that the original polling implementation is actually a direct read! (See Stdin's poll_read_ready)

[pid 95011] read(0,  <unfinished ...>
[pid 94997] <... futex resumed>)        = -1 ETIMEDOUT (連線超過時間)
[pid 94997] sigaltstack({ss_sp=NULL, ss_flags=SS_DISABLE, ss_size=8192}, NULL) = 0
[pid 94997] munmap(0x79dfaa456000, 12288) = 0
[pid 94997] rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, ~[RT_1], NULL, 8) = 0
[pid 94997] madvise(0x79dfa9e00000, 2076672, MADV_DONTNEED) = 0
[pid 94997] exit(0)                     = ?
[pid 94997] +++ exited with 0 +++
123
[pid 95011] <... read resumed>"123\n", 8192) = 4

And the trace from Rust's side is

TRACE [...]::poll_oneoff: enter
TRACE [...]::poll_oneoff: triggered fd=0 readiness=EPOLLERR userdata=0 ty=1 peb=1 fd_guards="[guard-file(fd=0, peb=1)]"
TRACE [...]::poll_oneoff: return=Ok(Errno::success) fd_guards="[guard-file(fd=0, peb=1)]" seen="Event { userdata: 0, error: Errno::again, type: Eventtype::FdRead }"
TRACE [...]::poll_oneoff: close time.busy=1.86ms time.idle=417ns fd_guards="[guard-file(fd=0, peb=1)]" seen="Event { userdata: 0, error: Errno::again, type: Eventtype::FdRead }"

We want polling without timeout blocks until stdin is ready, but non-blocking read must not block. The takeaway is that you can never truly make a non-blocking, concurrent program without essential APIs from OS.

After several failing attempts, I do not think the problem can be solved. But after a month of debugging, finally I found that the problem genuinely came from two instances of Stdins ever constructed. The solution can be broken up in two parts:

1. Carefully implement polling logic in poll_read_ready. Note that we do not need anything fancy in poll_read. It is the outer layer (i.e., fd_read that is responsible for the blocking/nonblocking mode.
2. Stick to that non-blocking IO from now on.

Here is my patch against Wasmer v4.2.5. Note that this patch only works for UNIX-like system , and programs relying on a blocking stdin will break.

The patch enables the nonblocking mode for fd_fdstat_set_flags, which a program can invoke through fcntl. It would be better to inherit that flag from the host. This way, the user can use a wrapper program (like stdbuf) to specify the mode.

This bug bothers me for nearly a month. I have to resort to talking with ChatGPT on my Rust-y code.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to osa1 and others for a discussion thread at Rust user forum, and the code from project @osa1/tiny.

TODO for Wasmtime.

This section serves as a placeholder. I expect Wasmtime easier to fix.