Re: epoll and closed file descriptors

[Bryan Donlan <bdonlan@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Gilad Benjamini
<gilad@altornetworks.com> wrote:
> Davide wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Gilad Benjamini wrote:
>>
>> > I am running repeatedly into a scenario  where epoll notifies
>> userland of
>> > events on a closed file descriptor.
>> > I am running a single thread application, on a single CPU machine so
>> > multiple threads isn't the issue.
>> >
>> > A sample set of events that I have seen
>> > - File descriptor (13) for a socket is closed
>> > - epoll_wait returns with no events.
>> > - Several epoll related calls happen
>> > - More than 20 seconds after the "close", epoll_wait finds an event
>> on fd 13
>> > with EPOLLIN|EPOLLERR|EPOLLHUP.
>> > - epoll_wait continues to report this event
>>
>> Epoll removes the fd from its container, when the last instance of the
>> underlying kernel file pointer is released (or when you explicitly
>> remove it with epoll_ctl(EPOLL_CTL_DEL)).
>> If you continue to get the event, it means that someone else has an
>> instance of the socket (that, looking at the events, saw a shutdown)
>> open,
>> by hence keeping the kernel object alive.
>> If you don't want to see the events, just remove the socket from the
>> epoll
>> set before closing.
>> Or, you remove the socket the first time you see an EPOLLHUP.
>>
>>
>>
>> - Davide
>
> I would, but epoll is preventing me from doing so.
> Early in sys_epoll_ctl there are these lines
>
>  file = fget(epfd);
>  if (!file)
>    goto error_return;
>
> Leaving me in a kind of dead lock

You could dup() the file descriptor before handing it to curl, and use
your own copy for epoll operations.