Re: [PATCH][RFC] Pollable /proc/<pid>/ - avoid SIGCHLD/poll() races

[Mattias Engdegård]

Paul Menage <[e-mail]> wrote:
>Except that this enhancement is not completely safe, as if you get more
>than 1024 children reaped (assuming you send two bytes of pid and two
>bytes of status) between checks of the pipe, you'll lose notifications.

Obviously, but the cases where the number of children is bounded below
1024 are rather frequent

>At least if you're only using the pipe to stop select() from blocking,
>you don't care about overflowing the pipe as there's no important
>information in there anyway.

sure, but then you have to put the pid/exit status somewhere else and
do some signal blocking/unblocking. In either case, it's portable,
which polling on /proc/pid isn't