Re: non-blocking I/O tests

[Eric Blake]

On 04/17/2011 12:15 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi Eric,
> 
> There were indeed some mistakes in the test. Now I've debugged it and added a
> test for non-blocking sockets as well.

Thanks again for tackling all of this.

> 
> As is, the socket test fails on Cygwin 1.5.x. After putting STDOUT_FILENO in
> non-blocking mode, get_nonblocking_flag reports that it is in non-blocking 
> mode,
> but it still behaves like a blocking socket. (You can convince yourself by
> setting ENABLE_DEBUGGING to 1 and doing
> "make check TESTS=test-nonblocking-socket.sh".)
> I don't know how to work around this, so I just put a comment in the test.

I'm not sure either, and cygwin 1.5 is starting to get old enough that
maybe we need not worry about it much longer.

> 
> Another complication was that on Linux (and similarly on MacOS X and Windows),
> a writer can send much more data to a socket than the values of SO_SNDBUF and
> SO_RCVBUF indicate. These values are 128 KB or less, yet it is possible for
> a write() call of 7 MB of data on a supposedly blocking socket to succeed
> immediately, before the reader has requested to read this data.
> 
> Yes another complication is that on Cygwin 1.5.x, writes of more than 64 MB
> fail with error ENOBUFS. While POSIX allows this failure, it is not clear to
> me whether it would not be better to implement in the module 'safe-write'
> or 'full-write' a logic that sends the data in pieces?

Indeed.  Cygwin 1.7.9 ended up resorting to chunked read/write under the
hood, since Windows in general has problem with pipes if you ever try to
send more than 64k chunks (it would sometimes, but not always, work).  I
definitely think that it's better to just document that write() is not
always reliable on super-large buffers, and to use safewrite() if the
goal is to send large buffers with under-the-hood chunking as necessary.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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