Bug in poll/select readable state on write end of pipe
Corinna Vinschen
corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com
Tue Nov 14 09:42:00 GMT 2017
On Nov 7 17:39, Erik Bray wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I encountered this bug through a hang in Twisted, but narrowed it down
> to a simple example (in Python here, but the same would work in C).
>
> Basically, in Twisted's system process runner, there's a "hack" [1]
> which basically assumes readability (as in a poll() loop) of the
> writable end of a pipe indicates that the pipe is closed and/or
> there's an error. Although the "hack" is disabled by default, in
> practice it is always forced to be enabled [2]. One could maybe
> consider this a bug in Twisted since I can't find anything in POSIX
> which states this behavior (though I could be missing it).
>
> Nevertheless, on Linux this *is* the behavior:
>
> >>> import os
> >>> import select
> >>> r, w = os.pipe()
> >>> poller = select.poll()
> >>> os.close(r)
> >>> poller.register(w, select.POLLIN)
> >>> print(poller.poll(1000))
> [(4, 8)]
>
> where 8 indicates that POLLERR is set on fd 4, indicating in this case
> that if we tried to write to the pipe we would get a broken pipe
> error.
>
> However, on Cygwin the same code returns an empty list. I don't know
> if this *should* be fixed, but it would be nice. It's slightly tricky
> though. In Cygwin's poll there's a line [3] that does something
> similar for sockets--if the socket is not connected it sets POLLERR in
> the results. One could do something similar for pipes, but there
> isn't an existing internal API to do this conveniently. What one
> might want is something that calls NtQueryInformationFile like in
> pipe_data_available [4], and checks the NamedPipeState flag. But that
> something doesn't exist yet.
>
> Any ideas?
What about utilizing pipe_data_available for just such an emergency(*).
There's a bit of cleanup in pipe_data_available necessary, but nothing
big:
- An int function returning "true", "false", and -1? Ouch.
- NtQueryInformationFile is just checked for a non-0 return value
but it should actually be checked against NT_SUCCESS.
But other than that, it should do the trick, shouldn't it?
Corinna
(*) Sorry for the "All Fowled up" pun.
--
Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat
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