Suggested addition to epoll interface - epoll_post_notification()

From: adi hodos
Date: Tue Sep 15 2009 - 08:59:15 EST


Hello everyone. Thank you for your time in reading this.
I have been playing with epoll lately and I would like to make a suggestion
regarding the epoll interface.
It would be nice to have a function to wake up a thread/process that is blocked
on an epoll_wait() call and sent it some
user defined data in the form of a struct epoll_event parameter ( something
similar with PostQueuedCompletionStatus() from Windows ).
My suggestion is for a function like this : int epoll_post_notification( int
epoll_descriptor , struct epoll_event* event );
It could be of much help in scenarios like these :

int e_accept;
int e_clients;

typedef enum {
keycode_client_connection ,
keycode_signal ,
keycode_socketio ,
keycode_fileio ,
keycode_event ,
keycode_timer
....
} event_key_type;

struct event_key {
event_key_type keycode;
};

struct eventfd_wrapper {
struct eventkey ek;
int fd_event;
};

struct signalfd_wrapper {
struct eventkey ek;
int fd_signal;
};

struct client {
struct event_key ek;
int sock;
....
};

struct user_posted_event {
struct event_key ek;
union {
void* ptr_data;
int i_data;
uint32_t u32;
uint32_t u64;
} u;
};


// thread A - waits for client connections using an epoll interface
for ( ; ; ) {
epoll_wait( e_accept , ... );

int s = accept();
struct client* new_client = allocate_newclient();
new_client->sock = s;
struct user_posted_event* ue = allocate_newuserevent();
ue->ek.keycode = keycode_client_connection;
ue->u.ptr_data = new_client;

struct epoll_event e;
e.data.ptr = ue;
epoll_post_notification( e_clients , &e );
}

// thread b - serves clients
for( ; ; ) {
struct epoll_event[..] e;
epoll_wait( e_clients , e , ... );

struct event_key* key = ( struct event_key* )( e.data.ptr );
if( key->keycode == keycode_client_connection ) {
// handle new client connection
} else if( key->keycode == keycode_signal ) {
// handle signal
} else if( .... ) {
...
}

Again , thank you for your time in reviewing this.
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