Subject: bug#24756: 26.0.50; Emacs should not use pselect

From: Philipp Stephani <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:45:22 +0000

Philipp Stephani <[email-masked]> schrieb am Fr., 21. Okt. 2016 um
17:42 Uhr:

>
> Emacs uses pselect for IO multiplexing, limiting the number of available
> file descriptors to FD_SETSIZE.  Rather, epoll/kqueue should be used, if
> available.
>
>
Some good counter-arguments were brought up:
- pselect is in the POSIX standard, whereas the possible replacements
(ppoll/epoll/kqueue) are not.
- The file descriptor limit should only be hit in pathological cases, e.g.
when leaking background processes, and is only a symptom of a bug somewhere
else. A higher FD limit would only hide the symptom, but not fix the
underlying root cause.

Given that, I'm no longer convinced that switching away from pselect would
be a good idea (but I'll leave this bug open for now to provide a space for
discussion).