sshpeer: initial definition and implementation of new SSH protocol...
sshpeer: initial definition and implementation of new SSH protocol
The existing SSH protocol has several design flaws. Future commits
will elaborate on these flaws as new features are introduced
to combat these flaws. For now, hopefully you can take me for my
word that a ground up rewrite of the SSH protocol is needed.
This commit lays the foundation for a new SSH protocol by defining
a mechanism to upgrade the SSH transport channel away from the
default (version 1) protocol to something modern (which we'll call
"version 2" for now).
This upgrade process is detailed in the internals documentation
for the wire protocol. The gist of it is the client sends a
request line preceding the "hello" command/line which basically
says "I'm requesting an upgrade: here's what I support." If the
server recognizes that line, it processes the upgrade request and
the transport channel is switched to use the new version of the
protocol. If not, it sends an empty response, which is how all
Mercurial SSH servers from the beginning of time reacted to unknown
commands. The upgrade request is effectively ignored and the client
continues to use the existing version of the protocol as if nothing
happened.
The new version of the SSH protocol is completely identical to
version 1 aside from the upgrade dance and the bytes that follow.
The immediate bytes that follow the protocol switch are defined to
be a length framed "capabilities: " line containing the remote's
advertised capabilities. In reality, this looks very similar to
what the "hello" response would look like. But it will evolve
quickly.
The methodology by which the protocol will evolve is important.
I'm not going to introduce the new protocol all at once. That would
likely lead to endless bike shedding and forward progress would
stall. Instead, I intend to tricle out new features and diversions
from the existing protocol in small, incremental changes.
To support the gradual evolution of the protocol, the on-the-wire
advertised protocol name contains an "exp" to denote "experimental"
and a 4 digit field to capture the sub-version of the protocol.
Whenever we make a BC change to the wire protocol, we can increment
this version and lock out all older clients because it will appear
as a completely different protocol version. This means we can incur
as many breaking changes as we want. We don't have to commit to
supporting any one feature or idea for a long period of time. We
can even evolve the handshake mechanism, because that is defined
as being an implementation detail of the negotiated protocol version!
Hopefully this lowers the barrier to accepting changes to the
protocol and for experimenting with "radical" ideas during its
development.
In core, sshpeer received most of the attention. We haven't even
implemented the server bits for the new protocol in core yet.
Instead, we add very primitive support to our test server, mainly
just to exercise the added code paths in sshpeer.
Differential Revision:
https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2061
# no-check-commit because of required foo_bar naming
