Re: [naviserver-devel] brave new world

[Stephen D. <sd...@gm...>]

On 9/25/06, Zoran Vasiljevic <zv...@ar...> wrote:
> Unix is not Unix as I see...
>
> Please note this (interesting) document:
>
>    http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/event_completion.html
>
> Mostly interesting, as there is now a very powerful and scalable
> notification interface on both Solaris and Mac OSX (aka BSD)
> Unixes. Windows has it as well, with Linux hanging pretty much
> behind (unfortunately).
>
> I wonder if we should start making ifdefs or wrappers to be able
> to benefit from the corresponding event notification interface
> available on the current platform.
>
> Mainly this would affect poll() usage in the driver thread
> but can also be used all arround the code where we have to
> wait for multiple "things" to happen.
>
> Does anybody have something to comment about that?


What's the goal?  We can certainly abstract socket event IO, with
poll() as a fallback. But some of the interfaces you mentioned here
can handle waiting on other things, e.g. signals.  Is this what you
want?

There's a start at socket event IO in nsd/event.c.  I didn't try
wrapping anything other than poll(). My main motivation was to create
a nice interface to clean up the main driver loop in nsd/driver.c, and
also to make something capable of handling the reader/writer stuff
that's in there, which is a little trickier due to the IO being spread
among more than one thread.

I have some patches for it somewhere. IIRC, the locking isn't flexible enough...

But it's code that exists so you can hack on it if you think it's suitable.


> Ah yes.., why "brawe new world"? Because Unix OS is diverging
> and OS vendors are adding new (incompatible) functionality
> on a monthly basis. I wonder how this will all look in 10
> years in future...


You'll be using Linux like every one else and it won't matter...  :-)