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Re: Bug in poll/select readable state on write end of pipe


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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