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Quotes of the weekQuotes of the weekPosted Nov 15, 2012 19:48 UTC (Thu) by alexl (subscriber, #19068)Parent article: Quotes of the week
I don't quite understand the problem people are having with non-POSIX stuff. For example, Gnome uses non-POSIX apis for things such as file change notification (inotiy,dnotify,fen,fam), more scalable poll (epoll,kqueue), power management, tracking logins on multiple consoles, etc.
None of these are in POSIX, because POSIX is all about encoding the shared behaviour of multiple unix versions at some previous time, and none of these problems are solved by existing versions of POSIX. So, do we just not do power management because its not in POSIX? Do we not nicely handle multiple logged in users on different consoles?
That said, it would obviously be nice if people cooperated more, so that we did not have to have 4 file change notification implementation is glib. That is not always so easy to do in practice though. I'm pretty sure that Robert Love had enough problems pushing inotify patches into Linux. If he had to also synchronize with *BSD and opensolaris people we would likely not have a file change notification API yet. And even if we did, it would not be in POSIX.
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Quotes of the week Posted Nov 15, 2012 21:55 UTC (Thu) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
Linux could have adopted kqueue, but instead has spent the past 10 years slowly reimplementing every feature. In some cases, reimplementing it multiple times. Linux is asymptotically approaching kqueue.
The BSDs, OTOH, rarely have a problem adopting useful Linux features. The most recent example are extended pipe(2), socket(2), and similar calls which allow specifying, e.g., O_CLOEXEC at descriptor creation time to eliminate the fork race with multiple threads.
BSDs are also converging on O_NOSIGPIPE, which is almost identical to the above, but which Linux refuses to adopt for no good reason other than obliviousness, or a severe aversion to adopting things not invented in Linux-land. Instead Linux only has MSG_NOSIGNAL, which only works with the send and recv syscalls, requiring old-style signal masking tricks for real-world code.
People who are predisposed to not caring about anything but Linux always frame the portability issue in negative terms--e.g. POSIX is useless because it's anachronistic and nobody supports all of it anyhow. That attitude is part of the problem. Portability is about keeping the lines of communication open, and actually seeing value in changes which ease porting software. POSIX is just one part of that. Portability done right improves everybody's software--both kernel and application.
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 15, 2012 22:08 UTC (Thu) by alexl (subscriber, #19068) [Link]
O_NOSIGPIPE would be very very nice. It would be awesome if linux could pick that up.
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 15, 2012 22:14 UTC (Thu) by alexl (subscriber, #19068) [Link]
I would also love xstat/fxstat. It almost seemed to happen with David Howells last push, but it seems to have died out... :(
Quotes of the week Posted Nov 16, 2012 6:41 UTC (Fri) by krakensden (subscriber, #72039) [Link]
My only experience using a kqueue semi-replacement on Linux is inotify, but... *christ* it was nice compared to kqueue on Darwin, with no unsolvable race conditions either.
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