To: Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com>
Cc: Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix@mulix.org>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC]  new syscall to allow notification when arbitrary pids die
References: <3EBC9C62.5010507@nortelnetworks.com>
	<20030510073842.GA31003@actcom.co.il>
	<3EBF144E.7050608@nortelnetworks.com>
	<m3y91cj0vm.fsf@varsoon.wireboard.com>
	<3EBF240A.4050706@nortelnetworks.com>
From: Doug McNaught <doug@mcnaught.org>
Date: 12 May 2003 09:23:12 -0400
In-Reply-To: Chris Friesen's message of "Mon, 12 May 2003 00:33:14 -0400"
Message-ID: <m3smrki9j3.fsf@varsoon.wireboard.com>
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Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com> writes:

> Doug McNaught wrote:

> > Rather than a new syscall, what about a magic file or device that you
> > can poll()?
> 
> This is definately an option to consider.  The problem that I see with
> this is that when you are trying to monitor large numbers of processes
> you have to worry about running out of file descriptors, and select()
> is no longer as happy.

No reason to have one FD per process monitored.  Just a single FD, to
which you can write() a control string to to add or remove a process
from the list, and for which read() yields a small data record
describing the process event that just happened.  It's a bit plan-9ish
but there's nothing wrong with that...

-Doug
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