Re: Matching file to a physical medium

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%googlemail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:28:53 -0700
George Georgalis <george%galis.org@localhost> wrote:

> I don't completely follow your situation; but I generally avoid
> nested mounts for a variety of reasons. Your I/O issue may be one
> of them, if I follow correctly.

Well, one of the problems I'm trying to solve is what to do in a
multi-threaded process, when threads access files and block forever,
because some file are on NFS and the network goes down.

Ideally I would like a thread to issue a system call, time it for a
number of microseconds and if there is no progress, abort the system
call.

I'm struggling to find a good way to do it, because simply calling
pthread_cancel() does not work. I'm not aware of any facility in Unix
to abort a system call, maybe Unix signals can help, but I'd rather not
mix signals and threads.