kqueue alternative?

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2003, Matthew Hagerty wrote:

> I'm writing a little application that needs to watch a file that another
> process is writing to, think 'tail -F'.  kqueue and kevent are going to
> do it for me on *BSD, but I'm also trying to support *cough* linux and
> other UN*X types OSes. 
> 
> >From what I can find on google, the linux community seems very opposed
> to kqueue and has not yet implemented it (they say: blah blah blah,
> aio_*, blah blah balh.)  What alternatives do I have with OSes that
> don't support kqueue?  I'd really hate to poll with stat(), but do I
> have any other choices? 

I was recently told about a library named libevent from Niels Provos,
which abstracts a variety of underlying event mechanisms behind a common
API.  You can learn a bit more about it here: 

  http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/

It doesn't appear to support /dev/poll yet, but the web page suggests such
support is planned.  If it's not already a port, we should create one. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories