Re: [PATCHv2 2/7] xread: poll on non blocking fds

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 09:42:01PM +0100, Torsten Bögershausen wrote:

> > Or do you mean to insert another continue in here?
> I was thinking that we run into similar loop as before:
> read() returns -1; errno = EAGAIN  /* No data to read */
> poll() returns -1; errno = EAGAIN /* poll failed. If the fd was OK, the failure may be temporaly,
>                                     as much as poll() can see.
>                                     But most probably we run out ouf memory */
> 
> So the code would look like this:
> 
>    if (!poll(&pfd, 1, -1))
>       return -1;

That changes the semantics of the function. The poll() is just a
convenience to avoid spinning. If it fails, with Stefan's patch[1] the
worst case is that we would spin on read() and poll(), instead of
actually blocking in the poll().

But if we return on poll() failure, now the caller will see errors from
poll() even though they don't know or care that we called poll() in the
first place. Consider what would happen with your code if read got
EAGAIN and then poll got EINTR. We would report an error, even though
the whole point of xread() is to loop on these conditions.

-Peff

[1] Stefan's patch does have a bug. It forgets to "continue" after
    calling poll, which means we will block with poll and _then_ exit
    with -1, instead of restarting the loop.