On Wed, 13 Dec 2006, Daniel Eischen wrote:

Whatever may be implemented to solve this issue will require a fairly serious re-working of how we implement file descriptor reference counting in the kernel. Do you propose similar "cancellation" of other system calls blocked on the file descriptor, including select(), etc? Typically these system calls interact with the underlying object associated with the file descriptor, not the file descriptor itself, and often, they act directly on the object and release the file descriptor before performing their operation. I think before we can put any reasonable implementation proposal on the table, we need a clear set of requirements:

While providing Solaris-like semantics here makes some amount of sense, this is a very tricky area, and one where we're still refining performance behavior, reference counting behavior, etc. I don't think there will be any easy answers, and we need to think through the semantic and performance implications of any change very carefully before starting to implement.