There is alot of talk going on over at the linux-kernel mailing list about implementing synchronous messaging for I/O. They are talking about a paper that was presented at USENIX:
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~gaurav/papers/usenix99.ps The general idea is that select() and poll() fall over with large numbers of file descriptors for two reasons. First, scanning the interest list begins to consume more time. Second, the stateless nature between calls means that alot of redundant processing occurs. The solution these guys (the authors) say is to have a way of registering interest in descriptors, then you can call a procedure to find out what has changed since last time. I personally think that select() is just fine and can be implemented more efficiently than currently, but I would be willing to give it a shot at both cooperating with the Linux people to get a good Linux/FreeBSD API layed down and then implementing it. I know some of you heard this paper presented so does anybody have any ideas about it? Does anybody care? -jason To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
