Buffer size used for FIFOS

[Justin T. Gibbs]

Would a sample program illustrating the failure increase interest
in this problem?  If so, I'd be happy to put something together.

--
Justin

Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
> I have an application (Berkeley make) that manages parallelism using a 
> FIFO.  The FIFO acts as a pool for "work tokens".  All processes,
> including the first that opens and "primes" the FIFO, must obtain a
> token from the FIFO before performing a job and return that token when
> the job is complete.  Priming the FIFO entails writing N (number of
> concurrent jobs) 1 byte tokens into the FIFO.  The only problem with
> this scheme is that it relies on the system having a PIPE_BUF value >= N,
> and FIFOs that honor this value.  Otherwise the tokens aren't guaranteed
> to fit in the FIFO.
> 
> In playing with this in cygwin, I quickly discovered that the named pipes
> used to implement FIFOs are created with a size of 1 byte.  This is far 
> less
> than cygwin's PIPE_BUF (4096) or the POSIX mandated minimum for PIPE_BUF 
> (512).
> After reviewing the code, the setting seems deliberate
> (fhandler_pipe::create_selectable() has an explicit check to avoid 
> bumping the
> size up to PIPE_BUF for FIFOs), but I couldn't find any code comments or
> changelog entries to explain the restriction.  Can anyone explain the
> requirement for this limit?  My limited testing (large parallel builds) 
> after
> recompiling the cygwin DLL from CVS with the value bumped up to 512, has 
> shown
> no ill effects.
> 
> Thanks,
> Justin
> 
>