Re: non-blocking I/O

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Paolo, Eric,

> prefer to implement {g,s}et_nonblock_flag functions. ...
> This module can then be used to build a fcntl F_GETFL/F_SETFL 
> implementation, but it is not very important to do so.

Nevertheless in gnulib we try to offer the POSIX APIs, if possible.

There are three APIs for non-blocking I/O on Unix:
  1) fcntl F_SETFL O_NONBLOCK  (POSIX, SysV)
  2) fcntl F_SETFL O_NDELAY  (older SysV)
  3) ioctl FIONBIO  (BSD 4.2)

According to the include files the support is the following:

  - glibc, MacOS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, OSF/1, Solaris,
    Cygwin, Interix   have all three APIs,
  - mingw             lacks F_GETFL, O_NONBLOCK, O_NDELAY
  - BeOS              lacks O_NDELAY, FIONBIO
  - Haiku             lacks O_NDELAY

So, barring bugs that we find during unit testing, we need
  - a replacement for fcntl F_SETFL O_NONBLOCK that supports mingw,
  - extend lib/open.c so that it handles O_NONBLOCK on mingw (presumably
    by failing, because Win32 does not support non-blocking I/O on
    regular files).

I agree that get/set_nonblocking functions are a good step towards this.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Rachel Levy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levy>