Re: non-blocking I/O

[Eric Blake]

On 03/29/2011 06:08 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> 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

Thanks for the research.  It looks like everyone except mingw supports
the standardized O_NONBLOCK, so I see no reason to implement O_NDELAY
(modern code shouldn't be using it) or ioctl FIONBIO.

> 
> 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).

Mingw supports named pipes (witness the mkfifo gnulib function), and you
can open named pipes with O_NONBLOCK; so supporting O_NONBLOCK would be
a useful addition for those.  For all other file types, POSIX recommends
that O_NONBLOCK is silently ignored rather than making open() fail
(http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=141); likewise, using fcntl
F_SETFL with O_NONBLOCK on regular files and directories is recommended
to silently ignore the bit (either mask it out on set, or the bit is set
on F_GETFL but has no effect) rather than failing.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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