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+# Event Framework {#event}
+
+SPDK provides a framework for writing asynchronous, polled-mode,
+shared-nothing server applications. The event framework is intended to be
+optional; most other SPDK components are designed to be integrated into an
+application without specifically depending on the SPDK event library. The
+framework defines several concepts - reactors, events, and pollers - that are
+described in the following sections. The event framework spawns one thread per
+core (reactor) and connects the threads with lockless queues. Messages
+(events) can then be passed between the threads. On modern CPU architectures,
+message passing is often much faster than traditional locking. For a
+discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of this framework, see @ref
+concurrency.
+
+The event framework public interface is defined in event.h.
+
+# Event Framework Design Considerations {#event_design}
+
+Simple server applications can be written in a single-threaded fashion. This
+allows for straightforward code that can maintain state without any locking or
+other synchronization. However, to scale up (for example, to allow more
+simultaneous connections), the application may need to use multiple threads.
+In the ideal case where each connection is independent from all other
+connections, the application can be scaled by creating additional threads and
+assigning connections to them without introducing cross-thread
+synchronization. Unfortunately, in many real-world cases, the connections are
+not entirely independent and cross-thread shared state is necessary. SPDK
+provides an event framework to help solve this problem.
+
+# SPDK Event Framework Components {#event_components}
+
+## Events {#event_component_events}
+
+To accomplish cross-thread communication while minimizing synchronization
+overhead, the framework provides message passing in the form of events. The
+event framework runs one event loop thread per CPU core. These threads are
+called reactors, and their main responsibility is to process incoming events
+from a queue. Each event consists of a bundled function pointer and its
+arguments, destined for a particular CPU core. Events are created using
+spdk_event_allocate() and executed using spdk_event_call(). Unlike a
+thread-per-connection server design, which achieves concurrency by depending
+on the operating system to schedule many threads issuing blocking I/O onto a
+limited number of cores, the event-driven model requires use of explicitly
+asynchronous operations to achieve concurrency. Asynchronous I/O may be issued
+with a non-blocking function call, and completion is typically signaled using
+a callback function.
+
+## Reactors {#event_component_reactors}
+
+Each reactor has a lock-free queue for incoming events to that core, and
+threads from any core may insert events into the queue of any other core. The
+reactor loop running on each core checks for incoming events and executes them
+in first-in, first-out order as they are received. Event functions should
+never block and should preferably execute very quickly, since they are called
+directly from the event loop on the destination core.
+
+## Pollers {#event_component_pollers}
+
+The framework also defines another type of function called a poller. Pollers
+may be registered with the spdk_poller_register() function. Pollers, like
+events, are functions with arguments that can be bundled and executed.
+However, unlike events, pollers are executed repeatedly until unregistered and
+are executed on the thread they are registered on. The reactor event loop
+intersperses calls to the pollers with other event processing. Pollers are
+intended to poll hardware as a replacement for interrupts. Normally, pollers
+are executed on every iteration of the main event loop. Pollers may also be
+scheduled to execute periodically on a timer if low latency is not required.
+
+## Application Framework {#event_component_app}
+
+The framework itself is bundled into a higher level abstraction called an "app". Once
+spdk_app_start() is called, it will block the current thread until the application
+terminates by calling spdk_app_stop() or an error condition occurs during the
+initialization code within spdk_app_start(), itself, before invoking the caller's
+supplied function.
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