Re: Synchronous signal delivery..

Matti Aarnio
2003-02-14T23:56:49Z

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 04:00:03PM -0800, Davide Libenzi wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Linus Torvalds wrote:
....
> > > > One of the reasons for the "flags" field (which is not unused) was because
> > > > I thought it might have extensions for things like alarms etc.
> > > I was thinking more like :
> > >
> > > int timerfd(int timeout, int oneshot);
> >
> > It could be a separate system call, ...
>
> I would personally like it a lot to have timer events available on
> pollable fds. Am I alone in this ?

Somehow all this idea has a feeling of long established
Linux kernel facility called: netlink

It can send varying messages to userspace via a file-handle, and is
pollable. Originally that is for network codes, and therefore it
already has protocol capable to handle multiple different formats,
handle queue saturation, etc.

Do we need new syscall(s) ? Could it all be done with netlink ?

/Matti Aarnio