Re: RFC: Native epoll syscalls

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> writes:

> On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 01:50:47PM -0400, Theodore Preduta wrote:
>> There are two main benefits to adding native epoll syscalls:
>> 
>> 1. They can be used to help port Linux software to NetBSD.
>
> Well, syscall numbers are cheap and plenty...
>
> The real question is: is it a usefull and consistent API to have?
> At first sight it looks like a mix of kqueue and poll, and seems to be
> quite complex.

It is definitely a real problem that people write linuxy code that seems
unaware of POSIX and portability.  If we had native epoll, then that
code could be built and used.  That of course doesn't fix the
portability issues, but it avoids them.

It seems to me that if we have epoll emulation, it should not be that
hard to also have it native, and I think the benefit in being able to
run (natively) programs written unportably is significant.