On Sat, 2008-08-02 at 11:25 -0400, Christos Zoulas wrote:
On Aug 2, 4:12pm, roy%marples.name@localhost (Roy Marples) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: select/poll bug?
| On Sat, 2008-08-02 at 14:26 +0000, Christos Zoulas wrote:
| > On NetBSD you should use pollts(2) I think.
|
| pselect is more portable I would guess, but platforms like OpenBSD lack
| either. I could trivially add a pselect wrapper for systems that lack
| it. But would pselect avoid the need to artifically reduce my timers on
| ALL platforms?
|
| I'll test it :)
The select family of system calls is generally inferior to poll because:
1. Expensive because you need do operations on bitmasks [ffs/shifts].
2. Expensive because you need to reset the masks before each call.
3. Non portable behavior for >= 256 fd's. All systems need source
recompilation; some older systems need kernel recompilation.
4. Non-portable behavior with respect to ERESTART.
5. Non-portable behavior when running out of resources. The only
way to fix this is using non-blocking-io which is a bit of a pain.
6. Non-portable behavior with respect to "struct timeval *timeout".
This is non-const, and it was originally intended to return
the time left. Most implementations did not change "timeout", but
one or two did, so it is always good to re-initialize "timeout".
7. Can only report 3 types of events, read/write/except.
Only 1 & 2 would apply here I think. We only monitor 4 fd's which are
all non blocking, we don't care about modified timeval and I only care
if something is to be read from the fd.
Linux has ppoll, NetBSD has pollts - no other platform has any
equivalents I can find.