Re: fadvise syscall?

Anton Altaparmakov
2002-03-17T15:04:17Z

At 14:31 17/03/02, Simon Richter wrote:
>On Sun, 17 Mar 2002, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
>
> > All of what you are asking for exists in Windows and all the semantics are
> > implemented through a very powerful open(2) equivalent. I don't see why we
> > shouldn't do the same. It makes more sense to me than inventing yet another
> > system call...
>
>It is easier for application writers to code:
>
>[...]
>#ifdef HAVE_FADVISE
> (void)fadvise(fd, FADV_STREAMING);
>#endif
>[...]
>
>Than to have a forest of #ifdefs to determine which O_* flags are
>supported. After all, we still want our programs to run under Solaris. :-)

Ugh. Both of your suggestions look ugly. Using the O_* flags, you just need
to have a compatibility header file which contains:

#ifndef HAVE_O_SEQUENTIAL
# define O_SEQUENTIAL 0
#endif

Then in the code you just use O_SEQUENTIAL and if the system doesn't know
about it it is optimised away at compile time.

Note how nicely this fits in with autoconf/automake where the ./configure
script can test for O_SEQUENTIAL and if it is not there automatically
define it to 0. That then means your code is completely free from these
ugly #ifdefs.

Thanks for making your point as that is ANOTHER argument for using open(2)
instead of fadvise() [1]. (-;

Cheers,

Anton

[1] Yeah, I know, one could also define fadvise() to nothing in the compat
header file...

--
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Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
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