Subject: Re: CAP TODO: single threaded

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 09:42:42 -0500

>And I don't know of any Unix that can not do alarms well.

No Unix does alarm() well.  They all implement it with SIGALRM, and 
signals are purest evil.  Once you start using them, you have to start 
worrying about signals interrupting system calls.  Every *single* time you 
make a system call, you have to retry if it fails with errno==EINTR.  This 
could be done, except that you're also calling into libraries, which also 
make system calls; and you have no control over those.

>The API's to backend databases - from mSQL, MySQL, the GNU-SQL,
>Oracle, and MANY others have nothing to-do with alarms. Many (all these?)
>allow for submitting the query and going back later for the answer.

Huh.  Maybe; I've never seen the feature, but then I've never needed to 
look for it.

>If your OS can't do OS alarms - then how will it ever handle iCal alarms?

Multiple processes.

/============================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer         |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.    |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.    |
|============================================================|
|The Player's Litany: The Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is|
|Data, and the Data is Life. --Daniel Keys Moran             |
\============================================================/

---

From: Doug Royer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 14:17:37 -0700

John Stracke wrote:
> signals are purest evil. 

Yes - you do think that :-)

However, the WG decided for bounded latency a long time ago.