Dear all, The Plasma Object Store provides a server process, reference C++ client, and Python binding for managing a collection of binary "objects" in POSIX shared memory. Applications use a lightweight messaging protocol to create and delete memory blocks in the object store, evict objects to make room for new objects, and increment and decrement reference counts to indicate shared ownership of memory. It also provides for subscribing to notifications about object activity. The system helps simplify ownership transfer and memory lifetime of shared memory blocks, which can be much more complicated in a peer-to-peer architecture.
The object store has been used in conjunction with the Apache Arrow libraries to provide for zero-copy access to collections of large objects stored in shared memory. Incorporating this project into Apache Arrow will help the community continue to develop and innovate technology for low-overhead sharing of complex datasets across multiple processes. Plasma Object Store was developed by the Ray project with the UC Berkeley RISELab. There have been 8 contributors, with about 3.1 KLOC of C++ code and an additional 5.1 KLOC of thirdparty C and C++ code which we have reviewed for compatibility with the Apache Software Foundation's policies on license compatibility. This code was split off from the Ray project from commit id `b94b4a35e04d8d2c0af4420518a4e9a94c1c9b9f` [1] and modified by the authors for inclusion in Apache Arrow in a GitHub pull request [2]. This code has been staged in a separate repository for review by the community and ASF IP Clearance: - https://github.com/ray-project/arrow-plasma-object-store/tree/11795753b0850cf5ad50d640067a8517ad8629a2#diff-69e56fcedf1b794992b790684902dcd4 This vote is to determine whether the Arrow PMC is in favor of accepting the code contribution. If the vote passes, the PMC and the authors of the code will work together to complete the ASF IP Clearance process and import the Plasma Object Store into Apache Arrow for inclusion in a future release: [ ] +1 : Accept contribution of Plasma Object Store [ ] 0 : No opinion [ ] -1 : Reject contribution because... The vote is open for 72 hours and will close at 18:15 UTC on Sunday 23 July 2017 and the results will be announced on this list. Thanks, Wes [1]: https://github.com/ray-project/ray/commit/b94b4a35e04d8d2c0af4420518a4e9a94c1c9b9f [2]: https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/742
