Re: linux vs. linux-libc-headers?

[Steffen Sledz <sledz@dresearch.de>]

Am 05.05.2010 12:05, Phil Blundell wrote:
>>> I thought glibc was supposed to gracefully fall back on missing syscalls?
>>
>> May be, but not satisfactorily.
>>
>> E.g. we've seen that g_file_monitor (from glib) falls back to
>> polling each second instead of using inotify_init.
> 
> That sounds like it's just a bug in glibc.  I guess you should fix it
> there.

That's all very unsatisfyingly.

I had a small look into the glibc sources. I could find the
declarations for inotfiy_init1 and epoll_create1, but i could not
find any fallback code if they do not exist in the running kernel.

I also could not find something about such fallback code at all.
FAQ 3.21 describes the problem what we have but for very old
kernel versions (2.0 vs. 2.1/2.2) and it says nothing about
glibc internal fallback handling but:

"Your program should check at runtime whether the function works,
and implement a fallback."

So where did this assumption come from?

Do you have examples for such fallbacks inside glibc?

Regards,
Steffen