Judge Daemon

Contents

• Introduction
• Usage
• Development
• Playing with the sandbox
• FAQ
  • How are the programs sandboxed?
  • Why are the sandboxes reused?
  • Why is comparator written in Cython?
• Copyright and License

Introduction

jd4 is a judging daemon for programming contests like OI and ACM. It is called jd4 because we had jd, jd2, jd3 before. Unlike previous versions that use Windows sandboxing techniques, jd4 uses newer sandboxing facilities that appear in Linux 5.19+. jd4 also multiplexes most I/O on an event loop so that only two extra threads are used during a judge - one for input, and one for output, thus allowing blocking custom judge implementations.

Usage

Prerequisites:

• Linux 5.19+
• Docker

Put config.yaml in the configuration directory, usually in $HOME/.config/jd4. Examples can be found under the examples directory. Create a directory for caching problem data, such as $HOME/.cache/jd4.

Use the following command to pull and run jd4:

docker run --privileged \
    -v ~/.config/jd4/config.yaml:/root/.config/jd4/config.yaml \
    -v ~/.cache/jd4:/root/.cache/jd4 \
    vijos/jd4

Development

Prerequisites:

• Linux 5.19+
• Python 3.8+

Use the following command to install Python requirements:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

The python libraries require kernel headers and libffi-dev.

Put config.yaml and langs.yaml in the configuration directory, usually in $HOME/.config/jd4. config.yaml includes the server address, user and password and langs.yaml includes the compiler options. Examples can be found under the examples directory.

We recommend to use the following commands to initialize the config:

mkdir -p ~/.config/jd4
cp examples/config.yaml ~/.config/jd4/
ln -sr examples/langs.yaml ~/.config/jd4/

Build the cython extensions inplace:

python3 setup.py build_ext --inplace

Use the following command to run the daemon:

python3 -m jd4.daemon

Note that this requires a sudo to create cgroups on first execution.

Playing with the sandbox

Use the following command to create and enter the sandbox:

$ python3 -m jd4.sandbox
[D 170312 15:15:38 selector_events:53] Using selector: EpollSelector
[I 170312 15:15:38 sandbox:153] sandbox_dir: /tmp/jd4.sandbox.k6ig1fv8
bunny-4.3$ ls
bin  etc  in  lib  lib64  out  proc  usr
bunny-4.3$

The in and out directory are bound to the corresponding directory in sandbox_dir, where in is read-only and out has write permission.

FAQ

How are the programs sandboxed?

We unshare everything (namely mount, uts, ipc, user, pid and net), and then create a root filesystem using tmpfs and bind mount, finally pivot_root into it. We also use cgroup to limit the time, memory and number of processes of user execution.

Why are the sandboxes reused?

We noticed that sandbox creation took around 100ms, therefore becomes the bottleneck while judging small programs. With sandbox pooling, we see 300-400 executions per second on our development machine.

Why is comparator written in Cython?

The comparator needs to process the user output by characters (in other word bytes). This kind of operation is very slow in Python. We see a 50x+ throughput increment by using Cython (like 3MB/s to 200MB/s).

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2024 Vijos Dev Team. All rights reserved.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.