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Christer Gustavsson <cg@nocrew.org> writes:
> barrilli@club-internet.fr (Vincent Barrilliot) writes:
> > And do you think the work we'll do on a XDD will be able to be ported
> > for Linux ? (kernel module or whatever ?)
>
> I don't know that since I haven't done any device driver in
> linux. Maybe Tomas knows better?
It's not difficult to make a device driver. But Linux won't need it
for this purpose, since it can handle 1024 file descriptors for each
process. I think a device driver in Linux would be too much work.
Linux handles that many file descriptors by using arrays for select(2)
instead of only one 32-bit value. I don't know if it would be
impossible to remake Fselect() to use the same scheme. The mintlibs
would most likely be incompatible with earlier ones though.
Another possibility, which Stefan suggested, would be to implement
poll(2) in MiNT, Fpoll(). It has the same functionality as select,
basically, but uses arrays of structs which the user provide, which
means there's no limitation to the number of file descriptors. There
still will be a limitation within MiNT (perhaps), unless that's
changed from 32 per process. Implementing Fpoll() and leave Fselect()
as it is wouldn't break backward compatibility either.
Of course, this is probably really something for the mint list. :)
Tomas
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