Jupiter Broadcasting
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2015–2024
2:00:28 · 39K views · Aug 20, 2015
A BSD Now episode featuring a long interview with Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill on dtrace, ZFS, pkgsrc, containers and more. It includes his rant on why Linux epoll is flawed and stories from Sun.
HN links it for Cantrill's entertaining epoll versus kqueue rant and his stories, such as bricking a machine with rm -rf.
12 comments from Hacker News
This sounds like something straight out of the Unix Hater's Handbook. :) But epoll is not the fault of Unix. Linux gets it wrong, but others do not. There's a good (and wildly entertaining) discussion/rant about it in this BSD Now episode: this video
Amusing Interview with Bryan Cantrill (regarding his background and he also shares some stories) this video Also very informative (about what happened at Sun in the 90s, dtrace, ...) Quite a funny and smart guy ;)
Probably not, since that would have allowed someone to add GPL-only code to it which couldn't be distributed with the whole. The video is very good and you can follow-up with this video
I also found the somewhat more casual BSDnow podcasts that featured Mr. Cantrill quite insightful[1,2,3]. He shows up around 15 or 30 minutes in. [1] this video [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
[LINK] While a best effort has been made to mimic the Linux semantics, there are some semantics that are too peculiar or ill-conceived to merit accommodation. In particular, the Linux epoll facility will -- by design -- continue to generate events for closed file descriptors where/when the underlying file description remains open. For example, if one were to fork(2) and subsequently close an actively epoll'd file descriptor in the parent, any events generated in the child on the implicitly duplicated file descriptor will continue to be delivered to the parent -- despite the fact that the parent itself no longer has any notion of the file description! This epoll facility refuses to honor these semantics; closing the EPOLL_CTL_ADD'd file descriptor will always result in no further events being generated for that event description. Brian Cantrill on epoll this video