[libvirt] mingw: test-poll pipe part fails

[Eric Blake]

On 07/19/2011 09:30 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> I'm wondering if the problem here is that libvirt is trying to use the
>> pipe-to-self mechanism as a fundamental event loop idiom.  That is, the
>> reason libvirt is calling poll is in order to minimize CPU until
>> something interesting happens, where interesting includes needing to
>> wake up a helper thread to do an action inside locks in response to the
>> receipt of a signal.
>>
>> Maybe you are on to something, and replacing all uses of pipe() with
>> virPipeToSelf() (which uses pipe() for efficiency on Linux, but
>> socketpair() on mingw), would allow libvirt to continue to use the
>> pipe-to-self idiom while also using fds that can actually be poll'd on
>> mingw.
>
> IIRC, we never resolved this for the last release. I think we should
> do as you suggest and just use socketpair() on Win32. Given the way
> in which libvirt uses these capabilities, I don't think the overheads
> of socketpair() vs pipe() are so onerous that we need worry about an
> even more fancy Win32 impl or eventfd for linux. Of course if someone
> wants todo a full job for gnulib meawhile, we won't complain...

Well, right now, we don't even have socketpair() for Win32.  We'd have 
to wire up some other native APIs for this to work.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake at redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org