Re: Syslets, Threadlets, generic AIO support, v6

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Wed May 30 2007 - 09:22:34 EST



* Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> epoll is very much is capable of doing it - but why bother if
> something more flexible than a ring can be used and the performance
> difference is negligible? (Read my other reply in this thread for
> further points.)

in particular i'd like to (re-)stress this point:

Thirdly, our main problem was not the structure of epoll, our main
problem was that event APIs were not widely available, so applications
couldnt go to a pure event based design - they always had to handle
certain types of event domains specially, due to lack of coverage. The
latest epoll patches largely address that. This was a huge barrier
against adoption of epoll.

starting with putting limits into the design by going to over-smart data
structures like rings is just stupid. Lets fix, enhance and speed up
what we have now (epoll) so that it becomes ubiquitous, and _then_ we
can extend epoll to maybe fill events into rings. We should have our
priorities right and should stop rewriting the whole world, especially
when it comes to user APIs. Right now we have _no_ event API with
complete coverage, and that's far more of a problem than the actual
micro-structure of the API.

Ingo
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