Changing the default IO timeout to 5 s (#5578) made a race visible
between the alarm_timer and select() in main_loop_wait(): If the timer
fired before select was able to block, the full select() timeout could
have been applied instead of returning immediately. Since #5578, this
causes heavy problems to the Musicpal board emulation with stalls up to
5 s, but also with some older Linux guest kernels.
The following patch introduces a pipe that is written to by
host_alarm_handler and select()'ed in main_loop_wait(). This avoids
prevents that select() blocks though a timer has fired and waits for
processing.
Signed-off-by: Jan Kiszka <address@hidden>