I would like to know how to resume a program from where the program left after a system shutdown and once the system is powered back on.
To be clear i have a program that needs the system to shut down and restart before it can execute a condition i want to know how i would continue execution from the condition that is supposed to run once rebooted
It's completely dependent on the program to implement that functionality. Very little, if anything you can do if the program itself is not providing it.
If it's a program you are writing then you need to be more specific about what it does and what it is written in. (Even then, it's quite hard to explain)
Related
Erlang world not use try-catch as usual. I'm want to know how about performance when restart a process vs try-catch in mainstream language.
A Erlang process has it's small stack and heap concept which actually allocate in OS heap. Why it's effective to restart it?
Hope someone give me a deep in sight about Beam what to do when invoke a restart operation on a process.
Besides, how about use gen_server which maintain state in it's process. Will cause a copy state operate when gen_server restart?
Thanks
I recommend having a read of https://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html
Here's my understanding: restart is effective for fixing "Heisenbug" which only happens when the (Erlang) process is in some weird state and/or trying to handle a "weird" message.
The presumption is that you revert to a known good state (by restarting), which should handle all normal messages correctly. Restart is not meant to "fix all the problems", and certainly not for things like bad configuration or missing internet connection. By this definition we can see it's very dangerous to copy the state when crash happened and try to recover from that, because this is defeating the whole point of going back to a known state.
The second point is, say this process only crashes when handling an action that only 0.001% (or whatever percentage is considered negligible) of all your users actually use, and it's not really important (e.g. a minor UI detail) then it's totally fine to just let it crash and restart, and don't need to fix it. I think it can be a productivity enabler for these cases.
Regarding your questions in the OP comment: yes just whatever your init callback returns, you can either build the entire starting state there or source from other places, totally depend on the use case.
I've been looking at lua and lvm.c. I'd very much like to implement an interface to allow me to control the VM interpreter state.
Cooperative multitasking from within lua would not work for me (user contributed code)
The debug hook gets me only about 50% of the way there, instruction execution limits, but it raises an exception which just crashes the running lua code - but I need to be able to tweak it even further.
I want to create a system where 10's of thousands of lua user scripts are running - individual threads would not work, and the execution limits would cause headache for beginning developers, I'm going to control execution speeds too. but ultimately
while true do
end
will execute forever, and I really don't care that it is.
Any ideas, help or other implementations that I could look at?
EDIT: This is not about sandboxing pretend I'm an expert in that field for this conversation
EDIT: I do not want to use an internally ran lua code coroutine based controller.
EDIT: I want to run one thread, and manage a large number of user contributed lua scripts, an external process level control mechansim would not scale at all.
You can search for Lua Sandbox implementations; for example, this wiki page and SO question provide some pointers. Note that most of the effort in sandboxing is focused on not allowing you to execute bad code, but not necessarily on preventing infinite loops. For better control you may need to combine Lua sandboxing with something like LXC or cpulimit. (not relevant based on the comments)
If you are looking for something Lua-based, lightweight, but not necessarily 100% foolproof, then you can try running your client code in a separate coroutine and set a debug hook on that coroutine that will be triggered every N-th line. In that hook you can check if the process you are running exceeded its quotes. You also need to take care of new coroutines started as those need to have their own hooks set (you either need to disable coroutine.create/wrap or to replace them with something that sets the debug hook you need).
The code in this case may look like:
local coro = coroutine.create(client_func)
debug.sethook(coro, debug_hook, "l", 1000) -- trigger hook on every 1000th line
It's not foolproof, because it may block on some IO operation and the debug hook will not help there.
[Edit based on updated question and comments]
Between "no lua code coroutine based controller" and "no external process control mechanism" I don't think you are left with much choice. It may be that your only option is to run one VM per user script and somehow give ticks to those VMs (there was a recent question on SO on this, but I can't find it). Before going this route, I would still try to do this with coroutines (which should scale to tens of thousands easily; Tir claims supporting 1M active users with coroutine-based architecture).
The mechanism would roughly look like this: you install the debug hook as I shown above and from that hook you yield back to your controller, which then decides what other coroutine (user script) to resume. I have this very mechanism working in the Lua debugger I've been developing (although it only does it for one client script). This doesn't protect you from IO calls that can block and for that you may still need to have a watchdog at the VM level to see if it's been blocked for longer than needed.
If you need to serialize and deserialize running code fragments that preserve upvalues and such, then Pluto is probably your only option.
Look at implementing lua_lock and lua_unlock.
http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/llimits.h.html#lua_lock
Take a look at lulu. It is lua VM written on lua. It's for Lua 5.1
For newer version you need to do some work. But it's then you really can make a schelduler.
Take a look at this,
https://github.com/amilamad/preemptive-task-scheduler-for-lua
I maintain this project. It,s a non blocking preemptive scheduler for running lua code. Suitable for long running game scripts.
I found a post about how to kill the program itself one year ago. It suggested writing some values in registry or windows directory or a location in disk when it runs first time. When it tries to run for the second time, the program just check the value in that location, if not match, it terminates itself.
This is simple and a little naive as any realtime anti-virus application would easily watch what value and where your program wrote in a disk. And in a true sense, that method did not 'kill' itself, the program just lies thare and sleeps intact and complete, only because of lack of trigger.
Is there a method that, in true meaning, kills itself such as deleting itself permanently, disemboweling itself, disrupting classes or functions or fragmenting itself?
Thank you.
+1 to this question.
It is so unfortunate that people often tend to vote down, if somebody asks questions that are related to tricky ways of doing things! Nothing illegal but at times this qustion may sound to other people that this method is unnecessary. But there are situations where one wants to delete itself (self) once it is executed.
To be clear - it is possible to delete the same exe once it is executed.
(1) As indicated in the earlier answer, it is not possible for an exe to get deleted once it is executed from disk. Because OS simply doesn't allow that.
(2) However, at this point, to achieve this, what we need to do is, just execute the EXE in momory! It is pretty easy and the same EXE could be easily deleted from disk once it is executed in memory.
read more on this unconventional technique here:
execute exe in memory
Please follow above post and see how you can execute an exe in momory stream; or you can even google it and find out yet another way. There are numerous examples that shows how to execute an exe in memory. Once it is executed, you can safely delete it from disk.
Hope this throws some light into your question.
An application cannot delete itself off the disk directly, because while the application is running the disk file is 'open' - hence it cannot be deleted.
See if MoveFileEx with the MOVEFILE_DELAY_UNTIL_REBOOT fits your requirement.
If you can't wait for a reboot, you'll have to write a second application (or batch file) that runs when the first application closes to wait for the first application to complete closing and then delete it.
It's chicken and egg though - how do you delete the second application/batch file? It can't delete itself. But you could put it in the %temp% directory and then use MoveFileEx() to delete it next time the machine is rebooted.
I have an application which needs to run several other applications in chain. I am running them via ShellExecuteEx. The order of running each of the apps is very important cause they are dependant on each other. For example:
Start(App1);
If App1.IsRunning then
Start(App2);
If App2.IsRunning then
Start(App3);
.........................
If App(N-1).IsRunning then
Start(App(N));
Everything works fine but there is a one possible problem:
ShellExecuteEx starts the application, and return almost immediately. The problem might arise when for example App1 has started properly but has not finished some internal tasks, it is not yet ready to use. But ShellExecuteEx is already starting App2 which depends on the App1, and App2 won't start properly because it needs fully initialized App1.
Please note, that I don't want to wait for App(N-1) to finish and then start AppN.
I don't know if this is possible to solve with ShellExecuteEx, I've tried to use
SEInfo.fMask := SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS or SEE_MASK_NOASYNC;
but without any effect.
After starting the AppN application I have a handle to the process. If I assume that the application is initialized after its main window is created (all of Apps have a window), can I somehow put a hook on its message queue and wait until WM_CREATE appears or maybe WM_ACTIVATE? In pressence of such message my Application would know that it can move on.
It's just an idea. However, I don't know how to put such hook. So if you could help me in this or you have a better idea that would be great:)
Also, the solution must work on Windows XP and above.
Thanks for your time.
Edited
#Cosmic Prund: I don't understand why did you delete your answer? I might try your idea...
You can probably achieve what you need by calling WaitForInputIdle() on each process handle returned by ShellExecute().
Waits until the specified process has finished processing its initial input and is waiting for user input with no input pending, or until the time-out interval has elapsed.
If your application has some custom initialization logic that doesn't run in UI thread then WaitForInputIdle might not help. In that case you need a mechanism to signal the previous app that you're done initializing.
For signaling you can use named pipes, sockets, some RPC mechanism or a simple file based lock.
You can always use IPC and Interpocess Synchronization to make your application communicate with (and wait for, if needed) each other, as long as you code both applications.
I am trying to understand which of the %exec, system, IO.popopen commands I can use in Ruby for what circumstances.
These pages explains it but I dont think so I quite understand what does starting a new application etc mean.
http://humblelittlerubybook.com/book/html/chapter4.html
From my understanding :
%exec: takes over your application process and runs the new command. So does that mean that once the system command is finished, it just exits OR does it resumes the parent application process ?
io.popopen: spawns a new thread and returns output and errs back to parent application ?. Is this safe command to use when you want to spawn a thread and do something in parallel ?
system: spawns a sub-process. This probably means that the control returns back to parent once the spawned process is done ? Does the parent process halts until the child completes execution ? [that sounds dangerous]
Can someone explain to me in English, in what circumstances do we use these commands?
Thanks
exec() is used to replace the currently executing program with the program specified as a parameter to exec(). The program you specify as a parameter to exec() becomes the currently executing program. If you're using RoR, you probably do not want to do this. If you're using plain old Ruby for a program, you might want to do this under certain circumstances.
system() is used to invoke a new program in a subshell. The currently executing program will block, or wait, until the program you invoked has finished running. You are right - this can be dangerous if you have a long-running program. If you have a program which can run-away but you want to use system, you can wrap the system call in the child part of a fork() call and have the parent kill the child process if it runs for too long. More on fork(): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28operating_system%29
system() will not give you the STDOUT or STDERR of the application in its return value. Instead, you'll get the exit status code. It's a general practice that programs will exit with a status code of 0 if they are successful, and anything else if they fail.
The backticks are an alternative to system() which return not the exit status code but the actual STDOUT of the program which was executed. You can obtain the exit status code of the program through the "$?" variable.
IO.popopen() (and Open3 and Open4) allows you to work with the STDIN and the STDOUT of a subprocess.
This seems to be a good place to get a little more familiar with some of these concepts as they are implemented in Ruby: http://tech.natemurray.com/2007/03/ruby-shell-commands.html
exec is something that most people don't need to use. The executed program becomes the active program, your original program looses execution, file handles etc.
popen is about standard input and output, meaning it's good to be used with filters, i.e. programs that write or read from standard input/output.
system is better used to execute a program, your original program keeps executing but waits till that program invoked by system finishes.