Reading from a UDP link busy-loops

[bmartin427]

It would appear the API provides no way to structure read handling so it does not 100% saturate a CPU core while waiting for received messages. This was maybe tolerable when all messages were synchronous command responses, but with the new auto transmit function, my driver needs to just sit and wait for asynchronous receive data all of the time.

To start with, the provided test-device-ping360.cpp example uses PingDevice::waitMessage() to wait for auto data packets. Internally, waitMessage() calls PingDevice::read() in a tight loop until its timeout expires. There is a comment here that says read() blocks up to 0.1s, but this comment is a lie (at least for UDP, I didn't check the serial path). Inside PingDevice::read(), we just call the port read() method exactly once, and then attempt to parse any data returned from it. UdpLink::read() always returns immediately with whatever amount of data it was able to pull out of its buffer at that moment, so there is no blocking happening.

Even if the test case using waitMessage() didn't have this problem, I would ideally like to structure my driver such that I'm not continuously polling for new data. I tried setting things up with AbstractLink::doOnReceived() to let me know when data is available, so I could read until the available data was exhausted and handle any packets that were parsed in the process, but it turns out this is impossible with the given API. Since PingDevice::read() reads exactly one byte and returns null in the case that either nothing was read or a byte was read but it didn't make a message yet (notwithstanding the API documentation on read() claiming that it reads until no data is left in the buffer), I have to call read() in a loop until the buffer is empty, but I have no good way of knowing that. I tried calling read() exactly the number of times as the number of entries in the vector given to me by the onReceived signal, but it turns out this doesn't work either, because UdpLink fires the signal before it puts the data in its buffer, meaning I can get notified 30 bytes were received, and call read() 30 times, getting nothing each time, before UdpLink makes its newly received data available to be read.

To summarize:

• PingDevice::waitMessage() with UDP busy-loops for the duration of its timeout
• UdpLink::read() does not block the way the comment in PingDevice::waitMessage() claims it does
• PingDevice::read() does not exhaust the port buffer the way its API comment claims it does
• Ideally, UdpLink would emit the onReceived signal only after the data it's signalling about is actually available