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epoll-shim

This is a small library that implements epoll on top of kqueue. It has been successfully used to port libinput, libevdev, Wayland and more software to FreeBSD: https://www.freshports.org/devel/libepoll-shim/

It may be useful for porting other software that uses epoll as well.

There are some tests inside test/. They should also compile under Linux and can be used to verify proper epoll behavior.

Sadly, this library contains some very ugly hacks and workarounds. For example:

• When using timerfd, signalfd or eventfd, the system calls read, write and close are redefined as macros to internal helper functions. This is needed as there is some internal context that has to be free'd properly. This means that you shouldn't create a timerfd/signalfd in one part of a program and close it in a different part where sys/timerfd.h isn't included. The context would leak. Luckily, software such as libinput behaves very nicely and puts all timerfd related code in a single source file.

  Alternatively, a target/library epoll-shim-interpose is also provided. Instead of redefining those symbols as macros they are provided as "proper" symbols, making use of POSIX dlsym chaining with RTLD_NEXT.

  What approach is more suitable depends on the application: If the use of epoll is very localized the macro based approach is less overhead. If the use of those file descriptors is more pervasive, the interposition approach is more robust. It will be a bit less performant because all calls to read/write/close and so on will be routed through epoll-shim.

• There is limited support for file descriptors that lack support for kqueue but are supported by poll(2). This includes graphics or sound devices under /dev. Those descriptors are handled in an outer poll(2) loop. Edge triggering using EPOLLET will not work.

• Shimmed file descriptors cannot be shared between processes. On fork() those fds are closed. When trying to pass a shimmed fd to another process the sendmsg call will return EOPNOTSUPP. In most cases sharing epoll/timerfd/signalfd is a bad idea anyway, but there are some legitimate use cases (for example sharing semaphore eventfds, issue #23). When the OS natively supports eventfds (as is the case for FreeBSD >= 13) this library won't provide eventfd shims or the sys/eventfd.h header.

• There is no proper notification mechanism for changes to the system CLOCK_REALTIME clock on BSD systems. Also, kevent EVFILT_TIMERs use the system monotonic clock as reference. Therefore, in order to implement absolute (TFD_TIMER_ABSTIME) CLOCK_REALTIME timerfds or cancellation support (TFD_TIMER_CANCEL_ON_SET), a thread is spawned that periodically polls the system boot time for changes to the realtime clock.

The library is tested on the following operating systems:

• FreeBSD 13.3
• NetBSD 9.4
• OpenBSD 7.5
• DragonFlyBSD 6.4.0
• macOS 13.7.1

Be aware of some subtle kqueue bugs that may affect the emulated epoll behavior. I've marked tests that hit those behaviors as "skipped". Have a look at atf_tc_skip() calls in the tests.

Installation

Run the following commands to build libepoll-shim:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
cmake --build .

To run the tests:

ctest --output-on-failure

To install (as root):

cmake --build . --target install

Changelog

2024-06-08

• Add support for kqueue1 on OpenBSD.
• Fix issue #46 (on FreeBSD, O_NONBLOCK flag of fds added to an epoll fd might change unexpectedly).
• Update CI action to vmactions/freebsd-vm@v1.
• Bump supported OS versions.

2023-04-11

• Add support for FreeBSD's POLLRDHUP.
• Use CMAKE_INSTALL_FULL_* in *.pc files (thanks alyssais!).

2023-01-28

• Initial port to macOS.

2022-07-03

• Fix crashes when libepoll-shim.so is placed after libc.so in library search order.
• Test on OpenBSD 7.1.
• Fix memory leak in tests (thanks arichardson!).

2022-06-07

• Introduce epoll-shim-interpose library. This library provides proper wrapper symbols for read/write/close/poll/ppoll/fcntl. If for some reason the macro based approach of redefining those symbols is not appropriate, using this library instead of epoll-shim might be an alternative.
• More faithful simulation of file descriptor semantics, including reference counting.
• Faster file descriptor lookup, using an array instead of a tree data structure.
• Define wrapper macros as variadic, except when ANSI C is used.

2021-04-18

• Fix compiler warning when using shimmed fcntl.

2021-04-17

• Allow setting O_NONBLOCK flag with fcntl on created file descriptors.
• Implement TFD_TIMER_CANCEL_ON_SET for timerfd.
• Implement correction of absolute (TFD_TIMER_ABSTIME) CLOCK_REALTIME timerfds when the system time is stepped.

2021-03-22

• Fix compilation on FreeBSD < 12 (#28).

2021-03-21

• Add O_CLOEXEC handling to created file descriptors (PR #26, thanks arichardson!). Note that the shimmed file descriptors still won't work correctly after exec(3). Therefore, not using EPOLL_CLOEXEC/TFD_CLOEXEC/SFD_CLOEXEC/EFD_CLOEXEC is strongly discouraged.

2021-03-10

• Fix compilation on FreeBSD 12.1 (#25).

2021-02-13

• signalfd now hooks into the signal disposition mechanism, just like on Linux. Note: poll and ppoll are also shimmed with macros in case sys/signalfd.h is included to support some use cases seen in the wild. Many more ssi_* fields are now set on the resulting struct signalfd_siginfo.
• More accurate timeout calculations for epoll_wait/poll/ppoll.
• Fix integer overflow on timerfd timeout field on 32-bit machines.
• Fix re-arming of timerfd timeouts on BSDs where EV_ADD of a EVFILT_TIMER doesn't do it.

2020-12-29

• Add support for native eventfds (provided by FreeBSD >= 13). The sys/eventfd.h header will not be installed in this case.

2020-11-06

• Add support for NetBSD 9.1.

2020-06-02

• On FreeBSD, add missing sys/signal.h include that resulted in sigset_t errors (#21).

2020-04-25

• Lift limit of 32 descriptors in epoll_wait(2).
• Implement EPOLLPRI using EVFILT_EXCEPT, if available. If it is not available, add logic to EVFILT_READ handling that will work if SO_OOBINLINE is set on the socket.
• Implement EPOLLONESHOT.
• Implement edge triggering with EPOLLET.
• Add support for unlimited numbers of poll-only fds per epoll instance.
• Merge EVFILT_READ/EVFILT_WRITE events together to more closely match epoll semantics.
• Add support for NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD.

2020-04-08

• Implement epoll_pwait(2).