[Haifux] Implementing read() like UNIX guys like it

[Eli Billauer]

Hi Muli,


I'll answer the your last question first: What I'm doing is basically a 
general-purpose connection between a hardware FIFO within an FPGA and a 
device file in Linux, with PCI Express as the data transport. That's why 
I don't know if data will be coming constantly or in small drops into 
the FIFO. I don't know if the user wants to use fread() or similar to 
read chunks, or fgets()/fscanf() to get records of data.


And most of all: I want this to work out of the box, even if the 
programmer and/or user is, how shall I put it, of the less qualified 
type. The less pitfalls, the better.


But it's more like a socket, anyhow. Or a pipe.


And I know about O_NONBLOCK, of course, and I'm going to support it. But 
that doesn't solve the "less qualified" issue. And still, we're left 
with the question of whether an O_NONBLOCK call should return zero or 
some bytes of data when it can't fulfill the entire request. I mean, 
strictly speaking, O_NONBLOCK only tells the driver not to block, but it 
doesn't say "give me what you have". Even though I would make the latter 
interpretation.


   Eli


Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 01:31:02PM +0300, Eli Billauer wrote:
>   
> There are a couple of ways you could look at it. First, ask yourself
> is the package user more likely to treat this as a file or a socket?
> And if a file, is it a structured file or a certain size, or is it a
> file whose contents are not known in advance? Then make your read
> behave the same way a read on such a file or socket would behave. I
> don't like this option, personally, because it makes assumptions about
> the user.
>
> The second way is to just support both modes of operation. Check if
> you were opened with O_NONBLOCK. If yes, don't ever block -- you are
> allowed to return -EAGAIN if you would otherwise block. If you were
> not opened with O_NONBLOCK, then blocking is allowed, and you can wait
> until you have a full quantum of data to return at once.
>
> Just out of curiosity -- what does the hardware do?
>
> Cheers,
> Muli
>
>
>   


-- 
Web: http://www.billauer.co.il