[zeromq-dev] missing events ZMQ_FD / ZMQ_EVENTS

[Paul Colomiets]

Hi Gerhard,

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Gerhard Lipp <gelipp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hello Paul!
>
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 8:29 PM, Paul Colomiets <paul at colomiets.name> wrote:
>> Hi Gerhard,
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 6:08 PM, Gerhard Lipp <gelipp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> i figured out to boil down an example, which shows this bug.
>>> it consists of three files:
>>> 1) x.lua doing the XREP XREQ stuff, must be started once
>>> 2) rep.lua implementing a simple echo replier, must be started once
>>> 3) req.lua making the request to rep.lua through x.lua. must be
>>> started TWICE to produce the error. THIS PROCESS LOCKS. uncommenting
>>> the ev.WRITE is a bad workaround to this issue.
>>
>> As far as I can see, it not a workaround. It's just the way ZMQ_FD works.
>> Uze zmq_poll if you don't feel comfortable for that. The only way you can change
>> that is returning getopt(zmq.EVENTS) instead of hardcoding ev.READ + ev.WRITE
>>
>
> According to the manual, the fd returned by zmq_getsockopt(ZMQ_FD)
> "signals any pending events on the socket in an edge-triggered fashion
> by making the file descriptor become ready for reading".
>
> If ev.WRITE is required to get all ZMQ_POLLIN and/or ZMQ_POLLOUT
> events, the doc should be clearer. Anyhow, as the source looks like,
> the ZMQ_FD is the fd associated with the socket's "mailbox", which is
> used for all kinds communication (state transitions?) inside of ZMQ. A
> "selecting/polling" user process should not wake up unnecessarily to
> avoid context switches, which are really expensive on our (embedded)
> device. Thus i'd like to minimize the wakeups by just specifying
> ev.READ.
>

Probably I don't understand the code. You must poll only for reading
on ZMQ_FD. But every zmq_send and zmq_recv cosumes mailbox.
Which means you must update you applications' state of readable
and writable flags (I mean your IO framework doesn't know that
socket became readable or writable).

If you don't care about ZMQ_POLLOUT event, you still must check
ZMQ_EVENTS for reading on each zmq_send.

-- 
Paul