Java SSLSocketChannel/SSLSelector?

[David Lloyd]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 4:19 PM Andi Mullaraj <andimullaraj at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2. What if someone decides to take the exact same approach to solve some other higher-OSI-layer protocol decoding? Now you have to choose which kind of protocol you want your selector to support.
>
> They create their own selector. I have hard time imagining one selector implementation being able to support various protocols at once.

That is the case today.  I can use one selector event loop today to
support TCP (including SSL) as well as UDP, even SCTP.  The point of
selectors is to combine many things into one event loop.

> 3. Note that with a plain selector and plain sockets, you *need* a thread to support the event loop anyway, I mean it has to run somewhere.
>
> I don't have enough knowledge here, but I am thinking it will depend on the OS ... if the OS provides similar hooks, then I'd say no other threads are needed -- the thread selecting would be entering a wait() until some notifier wakes it up ... not vital to the SSL part though.

It is definitely not OS-dependent; something in the end has to call
selector.select(), and that thing is indeed a thread.

I understand the urge to make SSL with Selectors easier, because right
now it is very painful.  But this approach is unlikely to succeed, at
least in the JDK.



--
- DML