Linux select() vs ppoll() vs pselect()

Between (p)select and (p)poll is a rather subtle difference:

For select, you have to initialize and populate the ugly fd_set bitmaps everytime before you call select because select modifies them in-place in a "destructive" fashion. (poll distinguishes between the .events and .revents members in struct pollfd).

After selecting, the entire bitmap is often scanned (by people/code) for events even if most of the fds are not even watched.

Third, the bitmap can only deal with fds whose number is less than a certain limit (contemporary implementations: somewhere between 1024..4096), which rules it out in programs where high fds can be easibly attained (notwithstanding that such programs are likely to already use epoll instead).

I'd suggest by starting the comparison with select() vs poll(). Linux also provides both pselect() and ppoll(); and the extra const sigset_t * argument to pselect() and ppoll() (vs select() and poll()) has the same effect on each "p-variant", as it were. If you are not using signals, you have no race to protect against, so the base question is really about efficiency and ease of programming.

Meanwhile there's already a stackoverflow.com answer here: what are the differences between poll and select.

As for the race: once you start using signals (for whatever reason), you will learn that in general, a signal handler should just set a variable of type volatile sig_atomic_t to indicate that the signal has been detected. The fundamental reason for this is that many library calls are not re-entrant, and a signal can be delivered while you're "in the middle of" such a routine. For instance, simply printing a message to a stream-style data structure such as stdout (C) or cout (C++) can lead to re-entrancy issues.

Suppose you have code that uses a volatile sig_atomic_t flag variable, perhaps to catch SIGINT, something like this (see also http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/functions/sigaction.html):

volatile sig_atomic_t got_interrupted = 0;
void caught_signal(int unused) {
    got_interrupted = 1;
}
...
    struct sigaction sa;
    sa.sa_handler = caught_signal;
    sigemptyset(&sa.sa_mask);
    sa.sa_flags = SA_RESTART;
    if (sigaction(SIGINT, &sa, NULL) == -1) ... handle error ...
    ...

Now, in the main body of your code, you might want to "run until interrupted":

    while (!got_interrupted) {
         ... do some work ...
    }

This is fine up until you start needing to make calls that wait for some input/output, such as select or poll. The "wait" action needs to wait for that I/O—but it also needs to wait for a SIGINT interrupt. If you just write:

    while (!got_interrupted) {
        ... do some work ...
        result = select(...); /* or result = poll(...) */
    }

then it's possible that the interrupt will happen just before you call select() or poll(), rather than afterward. In this case, you did get interrupted—and the variable got_interrupted gets set—but after that, you start waiting. You should have checked the got_interrupted variable before you started waiting, not after.

You can try writing:

    while (!got_interrupted) {
        ... do some work ...
        if (!got_interrupted)
            result = select(...); /* or result = poll(...) */
    }

This shrinks the "race window", because now you'll detect the interrupt if it happens while you're in the "do some work" code; but there is still a race, because the interrupt can happen right after you test the variable, but right before the select-or-poll.

The solution is to make the "test, then wait" sequence "atomic", using the signal-blocking properties of sigprocmask (or, in POSIX threaded code, pthread_sigmask):

sigset_t mask, omask;
...
while (!got_interrupted) {
    ... do some work ...
    /* begin critical section, test got_interrupted atomically */
    sigemptyset(&mask);
    sigaddset(&mask, SIGINT);
    if (sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, &mask, &omask))
        ... handle error ...
    if (got_interrupted) {
        sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, &omask, NULL); /* restore old signal mask */
        break;
    }
    result = pselect(..., &omask); /* or ppoll() etc */
    sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, &omask, NULL);
    /* end critical section */
}

(the above code is actually not that great, it's structured for illustration rather than efficiency -- it's more efficient to do the signal mask manipulation slightly differently, and place the "got interrupted" tests differently).

Until you actually start needing to catch SIGINT, though, you need only compare select() and poll() (and if you start needing large numbers of descriptors, some of the event-based stuff like epoll() is more efficient than either one).