Re: Unportable implementation of background worker start

On 2017-04-19 18:56:26 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Hm. Do you have a more-portable alternative?
>
> > I was thinking in a WaitEventSet from latch.c.
>
> Yeah, some googling turns up the suggestion that a self-pipe is a portable
> way to get consistent semantics from select(); latch.c has already done
> that. I suppose that using latch.c would be convenient in that we'd have
> to write little new code, but it's a tad annoying to add the overhead of a
> self-pipe on platforms where we don't need it (which seems to be most).

FWIW, I'd wished before that we used something a bit more modern than
select() if available... It's nice to be able to listen to a larger
number of sockets without repeated O(sockets) overhead.

BTW, we IIRC had discussed removing the select() backed latch
implementation in this release. I'll try to dig up that discussion.

- Andres