[sane-devel] Use poll() instead of select() in backends

[Nils Philippsen]

Hi there,

I recently got a bug report in Fedora[1] about a crash in the epson2
driver -- apparently, LibreOffice sometimes has more than 1024 open file
descriptors and a subsequently created socket (for accessing a network
scanner) gets a file descriptor > FD_SETSIZE.

IMO the best alternative would be to switch to using poll() but I'm not
sure how if that is supported by all platforms we support... Mind that
there are other drivers which use poll() exclusively without checking
for HAVE_POLL or similar (saned does its own cheap implementation of
poll() using select() if poll() isn't made available by the OS).

I think we should at least default to using poll() (so LO and possibly
OO don't crash if they use SANE and a networked scanner), but if we
don't support platforms that don't have it it's much less clutter to
ditch select() and replace it with poll() completely. Otherwise it's
something that should maybe be abstracted away in sanei.

What's your opinion?

Nils

[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1129771
-- 
Nils Philippsen / Wilhelmstraße 22 / D-71229 Leonberg 
nils at tiptoe.de / nils at redhat.com
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Ever noticed that common sense isn't really all that common?