[LUCENE-10158] Add a new interface Unwrappable to the utils package to ease migration to new MMAPDirectory and its testing

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 9.0
• Fix Version/s: 9.0
• Component/s: core/other, general/test
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Uwe Schindler
• Reporter: Uwe Schindler
• Created: 08/Oct/21 13:24
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 16:27
• Resolved: 10/Oct/21 22:25

Description

While creating the new MMapDirectory using Project Panama in the recent OpenJDK versions (not yet released, incubation only), I stumbled on our testing framework, which wraps many objects with AssertingXY. The problem with that is, mmap in project panama only works when the java.nio.files.Path is owned by the default file system provider. During testing we wrap it often with custom implementations emulating Windows or track open file handles.
If you pass such a wrapped Path to the NIO2 Panama APIs, it will fail with exception, because it can't refer to file channel internal methods from it. In the final version of Panama this may go away and we can provide our own wrapper for memory mapping, but this is problematic with current testing.

My plan is to release versions of MMapDirectory version 2 with different implementations of the Panama APIs for easy pluggin into Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch by just adding a JAR file that fits your JDK version. To run tests, unfortunately the MMapDir impl must "unrwap" the Path wrappers added by the test system.

To help with that and to make it more general, in my pull requests (e.g. https://github.com/apache/lucene/pull/177), I added a new interface org.apache.lucene.util.Unwrappable that allows to unwrap external code to get the "original" Path implementation. The same interface could be applied to many other Lucene/Test classes that needs unwrapping sometimes (e.g. around Directory or Queries), but for now it is only implemented for Test's FilterPath. The interface needs to be part of Lucene core and is used by production code to unwrap any test-framework FilterPath (or similar) wrappers. MMapDirectory version 2 uses it to get the original Path to be passed to MemorySegment.mapFile().

I'd like to get this into Lucene 9.0. It does not hurt, it is just an interface, which is implemented by test classes, ready for extension to other classes. It also provides the unwrapper method, which is generic.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #369