Avoid running nested runloops in ThreadedZMQSocketChannel

[marc-etienne]

Hi!

I'm the maintainer of a project called IPyIDA, which integrates the QtConsole inside IDA Pro.

I'm using lots of plumbing to make this all work, and use QtKernelManager and QtKernelClient (which inherits from ThreadKernelClient) to connect to the kernel.

Since jupyter_client version 7, IPyIDA doesn't work and raises a RuntimeError and starting the client (see eset/ipyida#44). My temporary solution was to require working version of jupyter_client until I can find the source of the problem.

After much hours (probably too much :D) trying to understand the problem I think I found a proper solution. My understanding is that the SocketStream.on_recv was designed to be used with (pre-v6) Tornado runloop. Since Tornado 6, the Tornado runloop is just a wrapper around asyncio's. on_recv still works with the asyncio runloop but receives the (completed) Future object with the result. Trying to await the Future in another runloop crashes because the callback is called from an already running runloop.

The suggested commit fixes the problem with minimal changes because I didn't want to break other things I may not have full understanding about.

[marc-etienne]

ccing @ccordoba12 because he seems to be a user for Spyder and may want to test the change.

This issue is related to #803 and #638.

[blink1073]

Hi @marc-etienne, can you please enable maintainer edits so I can push a fix for the linter?

[marc-etienne]

Apparently "Allow edits from maintainers" isn't available if forked repo sits in an organisation 🙄. I've given you write access directly instead.

I see the the flake8 and mypy error in CI log, I'll look into it.

[ccordoba12]

Hey @marc-etienne, thanks for the ping! Qtconsole tests run here, so that should be enough, but given that this kind of changes can be very disruptive, I'll open a PR in Spyder and set it up to run against your PR to be extra sure.

About the changes themselves, I think @davidbrochart is the best to review them.

[blink1073]

Thanks @marc-etienne and @ccordoba12!

[davidbrochart]

Qtconsole's tests fail, suggesting that the argument to the on_recv callback is indeed an asyncio.Future, so your changes seem right @marc-etienne. Pinging @minrk to confirm.

[marc-etienne]

I think the pyzmq doc on on_recv is outdated. Or this could be a bug in pyzmq itself, maybe it should be pyzmq's responsibility to call .result()... I think the callback arg differs depending on the pyzmq context type of the stream (I think Jupyter Client uses the asyncio one?). A more general solution which doesn't depend on the context type could be to test the type of the received arg of _handle_recv using asyncio.isfuture(msg) and changing the method signature to something like def _handle_recv(self, msg: Union[List[bytes], asyncio.Future]) -> None:.

[davidbrochart]

Let's clarify all that, and not try to guess the type of the argument at run-time.

[minrk]

The short answer is: ThreadedKernelClient shouldn't use zmq.asyncio.Context, it should use zmq.Context.

on_recv should indeed only get the message frames, but technically what it does is get the return value for socket.recv_multipart().

The problem is the switch here to zmq.asyncio.Context, which wasn't accounted for in ThreadedZMQChannel (or ThreadedKernelClient). So an async socket is being passed to a non-async API (ZMQStream), which means the async socket's result is getting passed to on_recv instead of the actual recv.

If there's a bug in pyzmq, it's that is creation of ZMQStream(zmq.asyncio.Socket) doesn't fail with a TypeError.

A class that uses ThreadedZMQSocketChannel should not be creating asyncio Sockets. You can always create multiple Python Socket objects for a single zmq socket with e.g. zmq.Socket.shadow(asyncio_socket) (or the other way around: zmq.asyncio.Socket.shadow(other_socket)).

[davidbrochart]

Thanks for the explanation @minrk. If I understand correctly, this PR should include https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter_client/pull/831/commits/bb2319c57a6d0749a8ed7070a0334ed2ac421289, and the changes you mentioned should be done in downstream projects (Qtconsole, Spyder, etc.). Is that right?

[blink1073]

As part of #835, we properly use a synchronous socket for ThreadedZMQSocketChannel.