[CRIU] [PATCH 2/3] signalfd: add ability to return siginfo in a raw format (v2)

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Hi Andrey,

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 6:41 PM, Andrew Vagin <avagin at parallels.com> wrote:
>
>> > signalfd is a special descriptor, so I think it
>> > is not a big deal, that it works a bit strange.
>>
>> Sure, but the more we special case things, the uglier the ABI as a
>> whole becomes. So special casing should be avoided as far as we can.
>>
>> > If all other would
>> > decides, that a new syscall is better, I will not ague.
>>
>> And that's more or less how I see it too. I'm not going to argue for a
>> new syscall, based on what I know so far.
>>
>> Here is one idea to think about though, while more or less maintaining
>> your proposed interface.
>>
>> At the moment, you select signal queues in the pread() call. An
>> alternative would be to do it in the signalfd() call. In other words,
>> you could have the following flags used with signalfd()
>>
>> SFD_RAW
>> SFD_SHARED_QUEUE -- reads will be from process-wide shared signal queue
>> SFD_PER_THREAD_QUEUE --reads will be from per-thread signal queue
>
> I suggested this variant in the initial series, but then we decided to
> avoid adding new flags. Oleg, what do you think about this?
>
>>
>> Specifying both SFD_SHARED_QUEUE  and SFD_PER_THREAD_QUEUE would be
>> the same as omitting them both, providing the default behavior of
>> slecting from both queues.
>>
>> My point here is that you can then separate the RAW functionality from
>> the queue selector functionality. Now, it might be that at the moment
>> you always require that if the caller specifies SFD_SHARED_QUEUE  or
>> SFD_PER_THREAD_QUEUE, then they must also specify SFD_RAW. But later,
>> that constraint might be relaxed, so that users could use signalfd()
>> to select from a particular queue when reading traditional (non-RAW)
>> signalfd_siginfo structures from a signalfd.
>
> I am not sure, that you understood this moment correctly.
> Currently SFD_RAW is independent on SFD_*_QUEUE. If signalfd is
> created without SFD_RAW, pread returns signalfd_siginfo-s.
> If SFD_RAW is set, read returns siginfo_t-s.

So, do you mean it is already possible to do:

fd = signalfd(-1, &mask, 0)      // no SFD_RAW flag
pread(fd, buf, count, SFD_PER_THREAD_QUEUE_OFFSET + pos)

to read a siginfo from the thread specific signal queue?

Thanks

> One more point for two flags is that we will be able to choose a queue
> from which signals will be dequeued. Currently we can choose a queue only
> for pread.

Also a good point, and another reason to place queue selection in the
signalfd() call, rather than in pread().

Cheers,

Michael


>> This does seem like a
>> very sensible design optimization to make now (and an easy one, I
>> would suppose). What do you think?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Michael
>
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-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/