Adding Executors

Teaclave supports several function executors currently: builtin, mesapy and wamr (WebAssembly Micro Runtime). For more information about current function executors, please check this link.

However, sometimes platform providers may found current executors built in Teaclave are not applicable for hosting some services, and they want to use their own executor or an executor shipped by the third-party to execute their code (for example, written languages other than Python or WASM). They can then modify Teaclave's source code to add a customized executor to run their functions.

Steps of Adding a New Executor

Executors can be either linked to Teaclave as a third-party library (e.g. Mesapy executor) or built in Teaclave itself (e.g. builtin executor). The source code of either type is located at executor/src/. The general steps for adding a custom executor can be summarized in the following steps:

1. Create a public executor unit struct and implement the TeaclaveExecutor trait.
2. Re-export your new executor in executor/src/lib.rs to make it callable.
3. Add enums in ExecutorType and Executor (in types/src/worker.rs), as well as corresponding logics for handling the added enums.
4. Import and register the added executor in worker/src/worker.rs.
5. (Optional) Add unit test to your customized executor

Linking Related Libraries

If the custom executor is embedded or ported to Teaclave, extern functions might be introduced into Teaclave and thus you also need to tell the build system where to find the library containing these external functions. You may add this library in the linking command at script cmake/scripts/sgx_link_sign.sh. The linker will try to find the library in ${TEACLAVE_OUT_DIR}, which is be parsed to build/intermediate in build phase. Besides, you can also add several lines to generate or download the library in CMakeList.txt.

Invoking the New Executor

Just call the API and remember to set executor_type to your new executor type's name (the string used in ExecutorType::try_from match case) when calling register_function, and set the executor to the executor's name correspondingly.