Hi all, This RFC is based on recent discussions with regards to how the poll function in a V4L2 driver should behave. Some relevant documents: POSIX: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/select.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/poll.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/read.html V4L2 Spec: http://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-apis/func-poll.html I've copied some descriptions from the POSIX poll document below: POLLIN Data other than high-priority data may be read without blocking. POLLERR An error has occurred on the device or stream. This flag is only valid in the revents bitmask; it shall be ignored in the events member. POLLHUP The device has been disconnected. This event and POLLOUT are mutually- exclusive; a stream can never be writable if a hangup has occurred. However, this event and POLLIN, POLLRDNORM, POLLRDBAND, or POLLPRI are not mutually- exclusive. This flag is only valid in the revents bitmask; it shall be ignored in the events member. 1) How *should* it work? Suppose we could redesign the way V4L2 handles poll(), how should it work? There are three cases: a) poll() called when streaming is in progress. This is easy: if a buffer is available, then return POLLIN (or POLLOUT for output). If an event has arrived, then OR with POLLPRI. b) poll() called when no streaming has started and the driver does not support the read/write API. In this case poll() should return POLLERR, since calling poll() when no streaming is in progress makes no sense. POLLHUP seems an interesting alternative, but other than for end-of-file or end-of-stream conditions it's meaning is very fuzzy. Linux also has a POLLRDHUP to make things even more confusing. So I would just stick with POLLERR. c) poll() called when no streaming has started and the driver supports the read/write API. I see no reason why we would do anything different from b). Calling poll() when there is no streaming in progress clearly means that there is no data available and that there won't be any data either until streaming starts somehow. 2) How does it work today? a) poll() called when streaming is in progress. We follow the procedure outlined above. So this is fine. b) poll() called when no streaming has started and the driver does not support the read/write API. In this case POLLERR is returned. So this is also fine. c) poll() called when no streaming has started and the driver supports the read/write API. Here things are different. poll() will in this case start streaming automatically and either return POLLERR if there was an error when starting streaming, or return 0 so it will wait until the first buffer arrives. The main problem is that it will also do this if the application only wants to poll for exceptions (POLLPRI). Unfortunately there is no reliable way in the kernel to discover whether the application wanted to poll for POLLIN or just for POLLPRI. This behavior simply kills applications that want to wait for e.g. changes in controls without actually starting streaming. An example is qv4l2. Another problem is that starting streaming from within poll can take a long time depending on the hardware. And poll isn't supposed to take a long time (exceptions are calling poll for userspace file systems). Actually, until 2.6.29 sleeping inside poll() wasn't even supported. In my opinion poll should never start the capture process. There is nothing in the poll POSIX document that says that it should. It complicates drivers and it is an ugly side-effect. 3) What are the consequences if we changed the behavior of c? Suppose we just changed the current behavior to the desired behavior. What would change for applications? Obviously, nothing will change for drivers that do not support read/write. For the others there will be a difference depending on whether the applications uses select(2) or poll(2). The select() function hides the exact event masked returned by the driver, so POLLERR will not show up as such, instead select() will just return and set the input or output mask of the corresponding fd. So there is no difference between POLLERR and POLLIN or POLLOUT as seen by the application. What will change is when read() is called: if it is in non-blocking mode, then it will start the streaming and return -EAGAIN. If it is in blocking mode, then there is no visible change in behavior. So drivers must be able to handle that error code. However, all applications must be able to handle that error anyway. It's part of the POSIX specification of a non-blocking read(). For applications that call poll(2) there will be a difference depending on what they do when they see a POLLERR: if they just ignore it and call read, then it is effectively identical to the select() case. If they actually test for POLLERR and return an error, then this change will break such an application. So the only time that a well-written application would break is when it uses poll(2) and read(2), and returns an error if POLLERR was set instead of just calling read(). 4) Proposal to change the poll behavior For the short term I propose that condition c is handled as follows: If for the filehandle passed to poll() no events have been subscribed, then keep the old behavior (i.e. start streaming). If events have been subscribed, however, then implement the new behavior (return POLLERR). Since events are new I think this is a safe change that will not affect existing applications. In the long term I propose that we put this in the feature-removal-schedule for v3.3 or so and stop poll from starting streaming altogether. Comments? 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