Architecture: More high-level documentation and diagrams.

Specifically, I'm adding a high-level MDD (simplified for clarity).

I'm also adding a diagram of the object relations among our manager
types.  (There are also communications that happen via channels, but
those aren't discussed here.)  That part closes #624.

There is probably more to say here, but this should form a scaffold
we can build on.
This commit is contained in:
Nick Mathewson 2023-01-05 17:04:52 -05:00
parent a7035d08a1
commit 5358339169
1 changed files with 120 additions and 6 deletions

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@ -10,13 +10,74 @@ exist. I hope this will make everything easier to test.
## Structure
To try to keep dependency relationships reasonable, and to follow
what I imagine to be best practice, I'm splitting this
implementation into a bunch of little crates within a workspace.
Crates that are tor-specific start with "tor-"; others don't.
Here follows a rough outline of our current crate dependency diagram. (Not all
crates and not all dependencies are shown; this diagram is simplified in order to
try to give a better understanding of the code structure.)
As a naming convention, crates that are user-facing start with "arti", crates
that are tor-specific start with "tor-", and crates that aren't tor-specific
have more general names.
```mermaid
---
Title: Simplified module diagram
---
graph TD
subgraph Application
arti --> tor-socksproto
end
subgraph Async Tor implementation
arti-client --> tor-dirmgr
arti-client --> tor-circmgr
tor-dirmgr --> tor-circmgr
tor-dirmgr --> tor-dirclient
tor-circmgr --> tor-chanmgr
tor-chanmgr --> tor-ptmgr
tor-circmgr --> tor-guardmgr
end
arti --> arti-client
subgraph Core Tor protocol
tor-proto --> tor-cell
end
tor-dirmgr & tor-circmgr & tor-guardmgr --> tor-netdir
subgraph Mid-level Tor functionality
tor-netdir --> tor-netdoc
tor-netdir --> tor-linkspec
tor-linkspec & tor-netdoc --> tor-protover
tor-netdoc --> tor-cert
tor-consdiff
tor-persist
end
tor-circmgr & tor-guardmgr --> tor-persist
subgraph Generic functionality
tor-bytes --> tor-llcrypto
tor-checkable --> tor-llcrypto
end
subgraph Rust async runtime
tor-rtcompat
end
arti-client & tor-dirmgr & tor-circmgr & tor-chanmgr & tor-guardmgr --> tor-rtcompat
tor-dirclient --> tor-proto
tor-dirmgr --> tor-consdiff
tor-circmgr & tor-chanmgr & arti-client --> tor-proto
tor-cell --> tor-bytes & tor-cert & tor-linkspec
tor-consdiff --> tor-llcrypto
tor-cert & tor-linkspec --> tor-bytes
```
I expect that the list of crates will have to be reorganized quite a
lot by the time we're done.
The current crates are:
@ -74,3 +135,56 @@ plenty of ways to accidentally leak information, even if you're
anonymizing your connections over Tor. We'll try to document
those in a user's guide at some point as Arti becomes more mature.
## Object dependencies and handling dependency inversion.
(Or, "Why so much `Weak<>`?")
Sometimes we need to add a circular dependency in our object graph. For example,
the directory manager (`DirMgr`) needs a circuit manager (`CircMgr`) in order to
contact directory services, but the `CircMgr` needs to ask the `DirMgr` for a
list of relays on the network, in order to build circuits.
We handle this situation by having the lower-level type (in this case the
`CircMgr`) keep a weak reference to the higher-level object, via a `Weak<dyn
Trait>` pointer. Using a `dyn Trait` here allows the lower-level crate to
define the API that it wants to use, while not introducing a dependency on the
higher-level crate. Using a `Weak` pointer ensures that the lower-level object
won't keep the higher level object alive: thus when the last strong reference to the
higher-level object is dropped, it can get cleaned up correctly.
Below is a rough diagram of how our high-level "manager" objects fit together.
**Bold** lines indicate a direct, no-abstraction ownership relationship. Thin
lines indicate ownership for a single purpose, or via a limited API. Dotted
lines indicate a dependency inversion as described above, implemented with a
`Weak<dyn Trait>`.
```mermaid
graph TD
TorClient ==> DirMgr & CircMgr
TorClient --> |C| ChanMgr & GuardMgr
DirMgr ==> CircMgr
CircMgr ==> GuardMgr & ChanMgr
CircMgr -.-> |W| DirMgr
GuardMgr -.-> |W| DirMgr
ChanMgr --> |As a ChannelFactory| PtMgr
```
We also use `Weak<>` references to these manager objects when implementing
**background tasks** that need to run on a schedule. We don't want the
background tasks to keep the managers alive if there are no other references to
the `TorClient`, so we tend to structure them more or less as follows:
```
async fn run_background_task(mgr: Weak<FooMgr>, schedule: ScheduleObject) {
while schedule.await {
if let Some(mgr) = Weak::upgrade(&mgr) {
// Use mgr for background task
// ...
} else {
break;
}
}
```