Using the devpoll (/dev/poll) Interface in the Solaris OS

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The Solaris 7 11/99 Operating System introduced a new mechanism for polling file descriptors. The /dev/poll (devpoll) driver is a special pseudo driver that allows a process to monitor multiple sets of polled file descriptors. Access to the devpoll driver is provided through the open(2), write(2), and ioctl(2) system calls.

The devpoll driver returns the number of the polled file descriptors that have data in them. One can then read only those file descriptors using a pollfd type array. Thus, one does not have to continuously poll a large number of file descriptors, including those that may not have any data in them. This makes for a more efficient use of the system resources.

For more details, see the list of contents below.

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• Introduction
• Description of the Test Case
• The UDP Server Program (udpdevpoll.c)
• The UDP Client Program (udpclnt.c)
• The Argument File Generation Program (generate.c)
• Source Code for the Programs
• udpdevpoll.c
• udpclnt.c
• generate.c
• Further References