re: Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2685
re: PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2179
As noted in PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2179,
the old code did not allow for reclaiming instances of types,
nor for properly copying them. That PR provided new functions
capable of reclaiming/copying instances of arbitrary types.
However, as noted by Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2685, using these
most general functions resulted in a significant performance
degradation, even for common cases.
This PR attempts to mitigate the cost of using the general
reclaim/copy functions in two ways.
First, the previous functions operating at the top level by
using ncid and typeid arguments. These functions were augmented
with equivalent versions that used the netcdf-c library internal
data structures to allow direct access to needed information.
These new functions are used internally to the library.
The second mitigation involves optimizing the internal functions
by providing early tests for common cases. This avoids
unnecessary recursive function calls.
The overall result is a significant improvement in speed by a
factor of roughly twenty -- your mileage may vary. These
optimized functions are still not as fast as the original (more
limited) functions, but they are getting close. Additional optimizations are
possible. But the cost is a significant "uglification" of the
code that I deemed a step too far, at least for now.
## Misc. Changes
1. Added a test case to check the proper reclamation/copy of complex types.
2. Found and fixed some places where nc_reclaim/copy should have been used.
3. Replaced, in the netcdf-c library, (almost all) occurrences of nc_reclaim_copy with calls to NC_reclaim/copy. This plus the optimizations is the primary speed-up mechanism.
4. In DAP4, the metadata is held in a substrate in-memory file; this required some changes so that the reclaim/copy code accessed that substrate dispatcher rather than the DAP4 dispatcher.
5. Re-factored and isolated the code that computes if a type is (transitively) variable-sized or not.
6. Clean up the reclamation code in ncgen; adding the use of nc_reclaim exposed some memory problems.
## Improvements to S3 Documentation
* Create a new document *quickstart_paths.md* that give a summary of the legal path formats used by netcdf-c. This includes both file paths and URL paths.
* Modify *nczarr.md* to remove most of the S3 related text.
* Move the S3 text from *nczarr.md* to a new document *cloud.md*.
* Add some S3-related text to the *byterange.md* document.
Hopefully, this will make it easier for users to find the information they want.
## Rebuild NCZarr Testing
In order to avoid problems with running make check in parallel, two changes were made:
1. The *nczarr_test* test system was rebuilt. Now, for each test.
any generated files are kept in a test-specific directory, isolated
from all other test executions.
2. Similarly, since the S3 test bucket is shared, any generated S3 objects
are isolated using a test-specific key path.
## Other S3 Related Changes
* Add code to ensure that files created on S3 are reclaimed at end of testing.
* Used the bash "trap" command to ensure S3 cleanup even if the test fails.
* Cleanup the S3 related configure.ac flag set since S3 is used in several places. So now one should use the option *--enable-s3* instead of *--enable-nczarr-s3*, although the latter is still kept as a deprecated alias for the former.
* Get some of the github actions yml to work with S3; required fixing various test scripts adding a secret to access the Unidata S3 bucket.
* Cleanup S3 portion of libnetcdf.settings.in and netcdf_meta.h.in and test_common.in.
* Merge partial S3 support into dhttp.c.
* Create an experimental s3 access library especially for use with Windows. It is enabled by using the options *--enable-s3-internal* (automake) or *-DENABLE_S3_INTERNAL=ON* (CMake). Also add a unit-test for it.
* Move some definitions from ncrc.h to ncs3sdk.h
## Other Changes
* Provide a default implementation of strlcpy and move this and similar defaults into *dmissing.c*.
Warning: This PR is a follow on to PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2555 and should not be merged until that prior PR has been merged. The changeset for this PR is a delta on the PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2555.
This PR re-enables the use of the server *remotetest.unidata.ucar.edu/d4ts*
to test several features:
1. Show that access over the Internet to servers using the DAP4 protocol works.
2. Test that DAP4 support in the [Thredds Data Server](https://github.com/Unidata/tds) is operating correctly.
4. Test that the DAP4 support in the [netcdf-java library](https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-java) library and the DAP4 support in the netcdf-c library are consistent and are interoperable.
The test inputs (primarily *\*.nc* files) provided in the netcdf-c library
are also used by the DAP4 Test Server (aka d4ts) to present web access to a
collection of data files accessible via the DAP4 protocol and which can be
used for testing Internet access to a working server.
To be precise, this version of d4ts is currently in unmerged branches
of the *netcdf-java* and *tds* Github repositories and so are not actually
in the main repositories *yet*. However, the *d4ts.war* file was created
from that branch and used to populate the *remotetest.unidata.ucar.edu*
server
The two other remote servers that were used in the past are *Hyrax* (OPenDAP.org)
and *thredds-test*. These will continue to remain disabled until
those servers can be fixed.
## Primary Changes
* Rebuild the *baselineremote* directory. This directory contains the validation data needed to test the remote servers.
* Re-enable using remotetest.unidata.ucar.edu as part of the DAP4 testing process.
* Fix the *dap4_test/test_remote.sh* test script to match the current available test data.
* Make some changes to libdap4 to improve the ability to catch malformed data streams [affects a lot of files in libdap4].
## Misc. Unrelated Changes
* Remove a raft of warnings, especially in nc_test4/tst_quantize.c.
* Add some additional explanatory information to the NCZarr documentation.
* Cleanup some Doxygen errors in the docs file and reorder some files.
re: Discussion https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/discussions/2214
The primary change is to support so-called "standard filters".
A standard filter is one that is defined by the following
netcdf-c API:
````
int nc_def_var_XXX(int ncid, int varid, size_t nparams, unsigned* params);
int nc_inq_var_XXXX(int ncid, int varid, int* usefilterp, unsigned* params);
````
So for example, zstandard would be a standard filter by defining
the functions *nc_def_var_zstandard* and *nc_inq_var_zstandard*.
In order to define these functions, we need a new dispatch function:
````
int nc_inq_filter_avail(int ncid, unsigned filterid);
````
This function, combined with the existing filter API can be used
to implement arbitrary standard filters using a simple code pattern.
Note that I would have preferred that this function return a list
of all available filters, but HDF5 does not support that functionality.
So this PR implements the dispatch function and implements
the following standard functions:
+ bzip2
+ zstandard
+ blosc
Specific test cases are also provided for HDF5 and NCZarr.
Over time, other specific standard filters will be defined.
## Primary Changes
* Add nc_inq_filter_avail() to netcdf-c API.
* Add standard filter implementations to test use of *nc_inq_filter_avail*.
* Bump the dispatch table version number and add to all the relevant
dispatch tables (libsrc, libsrcp, etc).
* Create a program to invoke nc_inq_filter_avail so that it is accessible
to shell scripts.
* Cleanup szip support to properly support szip
when HDF5 is disabled. This involves detecting
libsz separately from testing if HDF5 supports szip.
* Integrate shuffle and fletcher32 into the existing
filter API. This means that, for example, nc_def_var_fletcher32
is now a wrapper around nc_def_var_filter.
* Extend the Codec defaulting to allow multiple default shared libraries.
## Misc. Changes
* Modify configure.ac/CMakeLists.txt to look for the relevant
libraries implementing standard filters.
* Modify libnetcdf.settings to list available standard filters
(including deflate and szip).
* Add CMake test modules to locate libbz2 and libzstd.
* Cleanup the HDF5 memory manager function use in the plugins.
* remove unused file include//ncfilter.h
* remove tests for the HDF5 memory operations e.g. H5allocate_memory.
* Add flag to ncdump to force use of _Filter instead of _Deflate
or _Shuffle or _Fletcher32. Used for testing.
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2177
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2178
Provide get/set functions to store global data alignment
information and apply it when a file is created.
The api is as follows:
````
int nc_set_alignment(int threshold, int alignment);
int nc_get_alignment(int* thresholdp, int* alignmentp);
````
If defined, then for every file created opened after the call to
nc_set_alignment, for every new variable added to the file, the
most recently set threshold and alignment values will be applied
to that variable.
The nc_get_alignment function return the last values set by
nc_set_alignment. If nc_set_alignment has not been called, then
it returns the value 0 for both threshold and alignment.
The alignment parameters are stored in the NCglobalstate object
(see below) for use as needed. Repeated calls to nc_set_alignment
will overwrite any existing values in NCglobalstate.
The alignment parameters are applied in libhdf5/hdf5create.c
and libhdf5/hdf5open.c
The set/get alignment functions are defined in libsrc4/nc4internal.c.
A test program was added as nc_test4/tst_alignment.c.
## Misc. Changes Unrelated to Alignment
* The NCRCglobalstate type was renamed to NCglobalstate to
indicate that it represented more general global state than
just .rc data. It was also moved to nc4internal.h. This led
to a large number of small changes: mostly renaming. The
global state management functions were moved to nc4internal.c.
* The global chunk cache variables have been moved into
NCglobalstate. As warranted, other global state will be moved
as well.
* Some misc. problems with the nczarr performance tests were corrected.
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/541
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/1208
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2078
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2041
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2143
For a long time, there have been known problems with the
management of complex types containing VLENs. This also
involves the string type because it is stored as a VLEN of
chars.
This PR (mostly) fixes this problem. But note that it adds new
functions to netcdf.h (see below) and this may require bumping
the .so number. These new functions can be removed, if desired,
in favor of functions in netcdf_aux.h, but netcdf.h seems the
better place for them because they are intended as alternatives
to the nc_free_vlen and nc_free_string functions already in
netcdf.h.
The term complex type refers to any type that directly or
transitively references a VLEN type. So an array of VLENS, a
compound with a VLEN field, and so on.
In order to properly handle instances of these complex types, it
is necessary to have function that can recursively walk
instances of such types to perform various actions on them. The
term "deep" is also used to mean recursive.
At the moment, the two operations needed by the netcdf library are:
* free'ing an instance of the complex type
* copying an instance of the complex type.
The current library does only shallow free and shallow copy of
complex types. This means that only the top level is properly
free'd or copied, but deep internal blocks in the instance are
not touched.
Note that the term "vector" will be used to mean a contiguous (in
memory) sequence of instances of some type. Given an array with,
say, dimensions 2 X 3 X 4, this will be stored in memory as a
vector of length 2*3*4=24 instances.
The use cases are primarily these.
## nc_get_vars
Suppose one is reading a vector of instances using nc_get_vars
(or nc_get_vara or nc_get_var, etc.). These functions will
return the vector in the top-level memory provided. All
interior blocks (form nested VLEN or strings) will have been
dynamically allocated.
After using this vector of instances, it is necessary to free
(aka reclaim) the dynamically allocated memory, otherwise a
memory leak occurs. So, the recursive reclaim function is used
to walk the returned instance vector and do a deep reclaim of
the data.
Currently functions are defined in netcdf.h that are supposed to
handle this: nc_free_vlen(), nc_free_vlens(), and
nc_free_string(). Unfortunately, these functions only do a
shallow free, so deeply nested instances are not properly
handled by them.
Note that internally, the provided data is immediately written so
there is no need to copy it. But the caller may need to reclaim the
data it passed into the function.
## nc_put_att
Suppose one is writing a vector of instances as the data of an attribute
using, say, nc_put_att.
Internally, the incoming attribute data must be copied and stored
so that changes/reclamation of the input data will not affect
the attribute.
Again, the code inside the netcdf library does only shallow copying
rather than deep copy. As a result, one sees effects such as described
in Github Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2143.
Also, after defining the attribute, it may be necessary for the user
to free the data that was provided as input to nc_put_att().
## nc_get_att
Suppose one is reading a vector of instances as the data of an attribute
using, say, nc_get_att.
Internally, the existing attribute data must be copied and returned
to the caller, and the caller is responsible for reclaiming
the returned data.
Again, the code inside the netcdf library does only shallow copying
rather than deep copy. So this can lead to memory leaks and errors
because the deep data is shared between the library and the user.
# Solution
The solution is to build properly recursive reclaim and copy
functions and use those as needed.
These recursive functions are defined in libdispatch/dinstance.c
and their signatures are defined in include/netcdf.h.
For back compatibility, corresponding "ncaux_XXX" functions
are defined in include/netcdf_aux.h.
````
int nc_reclaim_data(int ncid, nc_type xtypeid, void* memory, size_t count);
int nc_reclaim_data_all(int ncid, nc_type xtypeid, void* memory, size_t count);
int nc_copy_data(int ncid, nc_type xtypeid, const void* memory, size_t count, void* copy);
int nc_copy_data_all(int ncid, nc_type xtypeid, const void* memory, size_t count, void** copyp);
````
There are two variants. The first two, nc_reclaim_data() and
nc_copy_data(), assume the top-level vector is managed by the
caller. For reclaim, this is so the user can use, for example, a
statically allocated vector. For copy, it assumes the user
provides the space into which the copy is stored.
The second two, nc_reclaim_data_all() and
nc_copy_data_all(), allows the functions to manage the
top-level. So for nc_reclaim_data_all, the top level is
assumed to be dynamically allocated and will be free'd by
nc_reclaim_data_all(). The nc_copy_data_all() function
will allocate the top level and return a pointer to it to the
user. The user can later pass that pointer to
nc_reclaim_data_all() to reclaim the instance(s).
# Internal Changes
The netcdf-c library internals are changed to use the proper
reclaim and copy functions. It turns out that the places where
these functions are needed is quite pervasive in the netcdf-c
library code. Using these functions also allows some
simplification of the code since the stdata and vldata fields of
NC_ATT_INFO are no longer needed. Currently this is commented
out using the SEPDATA \#define macro. When any bugs are largely
fixed, all this code will be removed.
# Known Bugs
1. There is still one known failure that has not been solved.
All the failures revolve around some variant of this .cdl file.
The proximate cause of failure is the use of a VLEN FillValue.
````
netcdf x {
types:
float(*) row_of_floats ;
dimensions:
m = 5 ;
variables:
row_of_floats ragged_array(m) ;
row_of_floats ragged_array:_FillValue = {-999} ;
data:
ragged_array = {10, 11, 12, 13, 14}, {20, 21, 22, 23}, {30, 31, 32},
{40, 41}, _ ;
}
````
When a solution is found, I will either add it to this PR or post a new PR.
# Related Changes
* Mark nc_free_vlen(s) as deprecated in favor of ncaux_reclaim_data.
* Remove the --enable-unfixed-memory-leaks option.
* Remove the NC_VLENS_NOTEST code that suppresses some vlen tests.
* Document this change in docs/internal.md
* Disable the tst_vlen_data test in ncdump/tst_nccopy4.sh.
* Mark types as fixed size or not (transitively) to optimize the reclaim
and copy functions.
# Misc. Changes
* Make Doxygen process libdispatch/daux.c
* Make sure the NC_ATT_INFO_T.container field is set.
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/1836
Revert the internal filter code to simplify it. From the user's
point of view, the only visible changes should be:
1. The functions that convert text to filter specs have had their signature reverted and have been moved to netcdf_aux.h
2. Some filter API functions now return NC_ENOFILTER when inquiry is made about some filter.
Internally,the dispatch table has been modified to get rid of the filter_actions
entry and associated complex structures. It has been replaced with
inq_var_filter_ids and inq_var_filter_info entries and the dispatch table
version has been bumped to 3. Corresponding NOOP and NOTNC4 functions
were added to libdispatch/dnotnc4.c. Also, the filter_action entries
in dispatch tables were replaced for all dispatch code bases (HDF5, DAP2,
etc). This should only impact UDF users.
In the process, it became clear that the form of the filters
field in NC_VAR_INFO_T was format dependent, so I converted it to
be of type void* and pushed its management into the various dispatch
code bases. Specifically libhdf5 and libnczarr now manage the filters
field in their own way.
The auxilliary functions for parsing textual filter specifications
were moved to netcdf_aux.h and were renamed to the following:
* ncaux_h5filterspec_parse
* ncaux_h5filterspec_parselist
* ncaux_h5filterspec_free
* ncaux_h5filter_fix8
Misc. Other Changes:
1. Document NUG/filters.md updated to reflect the changes above.
2. All the old data types (structs and enums)
used by filter_actions actions were deleted.
The exception is the NC_H5_Filterspec because it is needed
by ncaux_h5filterspec_parselist.
3. Clientside filters were removed -- another enhancement
for which no-one ever asked.
4. The ability to remove filters was itself removed.
5. Some functionality needed by nczarr was moved from libhdf5
to libsrc4 e.g. nc4_find_default_chunksizes
6. All the filterx code was removed
7. ncfilter.h and nc4filter.c no longer used
Misc. Unrelated Changes:
1. The nczarr_test makefile clean was leaving some directories; so
add clean-local to take care of them.
cloud using a variant of the Zarr protocol and storage
format. This enhancement is generically referred to as "NCZarr".
The data model supported by NCZarr is netcdf-4 minus the user-defined
types and the String type. In this sense it is similar to the CDF-5
data model.
More detailed information about enabling and using NCZarr is
described in the document NUG/nczarr.md and in a
[Unidata Developer's blog entry](https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/developer/en/entry/overview-of-zarr-support-in).
WARNING: this code has had limited testing, so do use this version
for production work. Also, performance improvements are ongoing.
Note especially the following platform matrix of successful tests:
Platform | Build System | S3 support
------------------------------------
Linux+gcc | Automake | yes
Linux+gcc | CMake | yes
Visual Studio | CMake | no
Additionally, and as a consequence of the addition of NCZarr,
major changes have been made to the Filter API. NOTE: NCZarr
does not yet support filters, but these changes are enablers for
that support in the future. Note that it is possible
(probable?) that there will be some accidental reversions if the
changes here did not correctly mimic the existing filter testing.
In any case, previously filter ids and parameters were of type
unsigned int. In order to support the more general zarr filter
model, this was all converted to char*. The old HDF5-specific,
unsigned int operations are still supported but they are
wrappers around the new, char* based nc_filterx_XXX functions.
This entailed at least the following changes:
1. Added the files libdispatch/dfilterx.c and include/ncfilter.h
2. Some filterx utilities have been moved to libdispatch/daux.c
3. A new entry, "filter_actions" was added to the NCDispatch table
and the version bumped.
4. An overly complex set of structs was created to support funnelling
all of the filterx operations thru a single dispatch
"filter_actions" entry.
5. Move common code to from libhdf5 to libsrc4 so that it is accessible
to nczarr.
Changes directly related to Zarr:
1. Modified CMakeList.txt and configure.ac to support both C and C++
-- this is in support of S3 support via the awd-sdk libraries.
2. Define a size64_t type to support nczarr.
3. More reworking of libdispatch/dinfermodel.c to
support zarr and to regularize the structure of the fragments
section of a URL.
Changes not directly related to Zarr:
1. Make client-side filter registration be conditional, with default off.
2. Hack include/nc4internal.h to make some flags added by Ed be unique:
e.g. NC_CREAT, NC_INDEF, etc.
3. cleanup include/nchttp.h and libdispatch/dhttp.c.
4. Misc. changes to support compiling under Visual Studio including:
* Better testing under windows for dirent.h and opendir and closedir.
5. Misc. changes to the oc2 code to support various libcurl CURLOPT flags
and to centralize error reporting.
6. By default, suppress the vlen tests that have unfixed memory leaks; add option to enable them.
7. Make part of the nc_test/test_byterange.sh test be contingent on remotetest.unidata.ucar.edu being accessible.
Changes Left TO-DO:
1. fix provenance code, it is too HDF5 specific.
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/1584
Support has been added for multiple filters per variable. This
affects a number of components in netcdf. The new APIs are
documented in NUG/filters.md.
The primary changes are:
* A set of new functions are provided (see __include/netcdf_filter.h__).
- Obtain a list of the filters associated with a variable
- Obtain the parameters for a specific filter.
* The existing __nc_inq_var_filter__ function now returns info
about the first defined filter.
* The utilities (ncgen, ncdump, and nccopy) now support
an extended format for specifying a sequence of filters.
The general form is __<filter>|<filter>..._.
* The ncdump **_Filter** attribute now dumps a list of all the
filters associated with a variable using the above new format.
* Filter specifications can now use a filter name instead of number
for filters known to the netcdf library, which in turn is taken
from the HDF5 filter registration page.
* New errors are defined: NC_EFILTER and NC_ENOFILTER. The latter
is returned if an attempt is made to access an unknown filter.
* Internally, the dispatch table has been extended to add a function
to handle all of the filter functions.
* New, filter-related, tests were added to nc_test4.
* A new plugin was added to the plugins directory to help with testing.
Notes:
1. The shuffle and fletcher32 filters are not part of the multifilter system.
Misc. changes:
1. A debug module was added to libhdf5 to help catch error locations.
