[FFI] interference of FFI with poll(3)?

28 Apr 2012

      Dear all,

after noticing problems with libssh2, and trying to fix this myself, I ran
into a strange experience which I wish to get an explanation for.

After compiling an OpenSSH server and a raw C libssh2 (for comparison) with
debug messaging, I with support of the libssh2 community was able to trace
the problem back to a call to poll(3) in session.c::_libssh2_wait_socket(),

   rc = poll(sockets, 1, has_timeout?ms_to_next: -1);

where sockets consists of a single socket, session->socket_fd.

This is roughly a polling with timeout for the connection – and, with the
Haskell FFI, an

  error 4 / EINTR / Interrupted system call

is thrown, and I was explained that this probably is caused by another
signal of the same code unit. Not finding anything, I at the end extended
libssh2 by a function,

LIBSSH2_API void libssh2_test(void){
  struct sockaddr_in sin;
  LIBSSH2_SESSION *session;
  const char *fingerprint;
  LIBSSH2_CHANNEL *channel;
  const unsigned long hostaddr= htonl(0x7F000001);
  const char *username= "i";
  const char *keyfile1="/home/i/.ssh/id_rsa.pub";
  const char *keyfile2="/home/i/.ssh/id_rsa";
  const char *password= "D0r1nha23";
  int got= 0;
  int sock= socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
  sin.sin_family= AF_INET;
  sin.sin_port= htons(22);
  sin.sin_addr.s_addr= hostaddr;
  if(connect( sock, (struct sockaddr*)(&sin), sizeof(struct sockaddr_in)
            ) != 0 ) {
    fprintf(stderr, "failed to connect!\n");
    return;
  }
  session= libssh2_session_init();
  libssh2_trace(session,~0);
  if(libssh2_session_handshake(session, sock)) {
    _libssh2_debug(session, LIBSSH2_TRACE_TRANS
                  , "Failure establishing SSH session" );
    return;
  }
  fingerprint= libssh2_hostkey_hash(session, LIBSSH2_HOSTKEY_HASH_SHA1);
  libssh2_userauth_list(session, username, strlen(username)); // ??
  if(libssh2_userauth_publickey_fromfile( session
                                        , username
                                        , keyfile1
                                        , keyfile2
                                        , password )) {
    _libssh2_debug(session, LIBSSH2_TRACE_TRANS
                  , "\tAuthentication by public key failed!" );
    return;
  } else {
    _libssh2_debug( session, LIBSSH2_TRACE_TRANS
                  , "\tAuthentication by public key succeeded." );
    if(!(channel= libssh2_channel_open_session(session))) {
      _libssh2_debug( session, LIBSSH2_TRACE_TRANS
                    , "Unable to open a session" );
      return;
    } else {
      libssh2_channel_setenv(channel, "FOO", "bar");
      if(libssh2_channel_request_pty(channel, "vanilla")) {
        _libssh2_debug( session, LIBSSH2_TRACE_TRANS
                      , "Failed requesting pty" );
      } else {
        if(libssh2_channel_shell(channel)) {
          _libssh2_debug( session, LIBSSH2_TRACE_TRANS
                        , "Unable to request shell on allocated pty" );
        } else {
          if(channel){
            libssh2_channel_free(channel);
            channel= NULL;
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
  libssh2_session_disconnect( session
                            , "Normal Shutdown, Thank you for playing" );
  libssh2_session_free(session);
  close(sock);
  libssh2_exit();
  return;
}

and called it by

foreign import ccall unsafe "libssh2_test"
  libssh2Test:: IO ()

as well as

{# context lib="ssh2" prefix="libssh2" #}
{# fun test as test { } -> `()' #}

With both approaches, I still got the same EINTR error, while coalling
libssh2_test() from C works completely flawless.

Is it possible that an interfering signal comes from the FFI? If yes, is
there a workaround?

Grateful for any kind of enlightenment... :-)

Thanks a lot in advance, Nick

[FFI] interference of FFI with poll(3)?

Nick Rudnick