You are not logged in.
Hi, I'm a socket newbie, so I apologize for lame questions :-)
I'm trying to implement 2-way communication over a socket. Outbound data are supplied by some worker thread through a shared FIFO (guarded by a mutex certainly). Inbound data from a socket are to be returned to the worker thread through another FIFO. For reasons that I don't want to discuss here, I don't want worker thread to touch sockets. Inbound or outbound data can arrive at any time.
Now the question. Is it possible to have only one thread doing both socket reads and writes without polling? In other words, is it possible to wait for socket inbound data in select() function and at the same time be able to receive signals from the worker thread (signals meaning "new outbound data in FIFO")? In other words, is there a single blocking function capable for waiting on a socket OR a signal (condition variable)? In yet other words, is there an equivalent of Win32's WaitForMultipleObjects?
I was thinking of two solutions:
1. Instead of condition variables, use internal (inter-thread) sockets for signalling between threads. And wait in select() for either socket being readable. But this sounds odd for me. Is it ok?
2. Have two threads: one for socket writes (that one would wait for signals from the worker thread) and one for reads (that would wait in select()). This sounds odd too. In this solution, is there a need for any mutexes guarding access to the socket? When to lock them, when to unlock?
I would appreciate any help.
Regards,
AdamCi.
Offline
Solution #1 is the way to go IMO. Use socketpair() (not available under Windows, but it's possible to write your own implementation of it) to create a pair of sockets connected to each other, and then to "signal" the other thread, just write a byte (any byte) to your thread's socket, and that will cause the other thread to drop out of select(), read the byte, and do whatever else you need it to do.
I've been using that technique for years, and it works well for me. Before I realized I could do that, I also had tried the read_thread+write_thread design, but found it lacking.
Offline
Offline
Thanks i3839 fo your reply.
My program needs to be portable (Win/Linux) so epoll is out of the question, right?
You asked what I need signalling for. I'm not sure if I understant correctly, co I'll clarify what I meant by FIFO. It's a simple class based on std::list/queue.vector/whatever. Worker thread puts data at the end and the socket-talker thread removes data from the head. Each time the worker thread adds new data to the queue, I want it to signal (i.e. notify) the talker thread. Such signal should make the talker thread: wake up from its waiting for socket inbound data, look at new data in the queue, transmit it through the socket and get back to sleep (while waiting for new inbound data).
Or maybe I should do something with the socket, that would invalidate it and thus make the select() call return with an error?
Regards,
AdamCi.
Offline
Offline
Thanks for your reply, And sorry for introducing confusion in terminology - as I said, I'm a newbie.
:-)
Offline
Hi
I want to make a simple packet analyzer which only display the incoming packet header information but i want to do this with Linux signals .Is there any signals which dispatches when packet arrives on raw sockets.any help will be appreciated.
You could use SIGIO, with fcntl(2) and F_SETSIG.
But usually people avoid signals as much as possible
because they're slow, racy and plain annoying to use.
Offline