LWN: Comments on "A sys_poll() ABI tweak"

A sys_poll() ABI tweak

sdalley — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:39:33 +0000

The quality of posts does vary, doesn't it.

After reading landley's GP, and the references he supplied, I understand the subtleties of the actual situation.

After reading khim's post, I am left completely uninformed, and with the strong impression that the poster is an arrogant twerp. It's only an impression, though, and I could be wrong ...

A sys_poll() ABI tweak

khim — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:03:36 +0000

No, int and long _aren't_ the same size on "most" architectures.

Of course they are!

They're the same size on 32 bit architectures, different on 64 bit.

Not always and anyway: number of 32 bit architectures dwarfs the number of 64 bit architectures, so what's your point?

A sys_poll() ABI tweak

landley — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:45:10 +0000

No, int and long _aren't_ the same size on "most" architectures. They're the same size on 32 bit architectures, different on 64 bit. There's a standard for this, which Linux follows (and MacOS X, and most other unix variants):

http://www.unix.org/whitepapers/64bit.html

Here's the rationale:

http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html

And here's the insane legacy reasons Windows decided to do something else instead:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/31/36...

Rob

A sys_poll() ABI tweak

dmarti — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:47:51 +0000

Anyone who's actually using timeouts that long has probably already been tarred and feathered by their QA dept. How would you test them?

A sys_poll() ABI tweak

jzbiciak — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:34:57 +0000

Well, lessee... 2 billion milliseconds is 2 million seconds. That's just over 23 days. Are there good reasons to have timeouts longer than that that aren't actually infinite?