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EVENTFD(2) FreeBSD System Calls Manual EVENTFD(2)
NAME
eventfd - create a file descriptor for event notification
LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/eventfd.h>
int
eventfd(unsigned int initval, int flags);
int
eventfd_read(int fd, eventfd_t *value);
int
eventfd_write(int fd, eventfd_t value);
DESCRIPTION
eventfd() creates a special file descriptor with event counter or
semaphore semantics, designed for interprocess communication. The
returned file descriptor refers to a kernel object containing an unsigned
64-bit integer counter, which is initialized with the value of the
initval argument.
The flags argument may contain the result of or'ing the following values:
EFD_CLOEXEC set FD_CLOEXEC on the file descriptor
EFD_NONBLOCK do not block on read/write operations
EFD_SEMAPHORE use semaphore semantics
File operations have the following semantics:
read(2) If the counter is zero, the call blocks until the counter
becomes non-zero, unless EFD_NONBLOCK was set, in which
case it would fail with EAGAIN instead.
If the counter is non-zero:
o If EFD_SEMAPHORE is not set, the current value of the
counter is returned, and the value is reset to zero.
o If EFD_SEMAPHORE is set, the constant 1 is returned,
and the value is decremented by 1.
The numeric value is encoded as 64-bit (8 bytes) in host
byte order. The read(2) call fails with EINVAL if there
is less than 8 bytes available in the supplied buffer.
write(2) Adds the given value to the counter. The maximum value
that can be stored in the counter is the maximum unsigned
64-bit integer value minus one (0xfffffffffffffffe).
If the resulting value exceeds the maximum, the call would
block until the value is reduced by read(2), unless
EFD_NONBLOCK was set, in which case it would fail with
EAGAIN instead.
select(2) / pselect(2) / kqueue(2), the following
semantics apply:
o The file descriptor is readable when the counter is
greater than zero.
o The file descriptor is writable when the counter is
less than the maximum value.
File descriptors created by eventfd() are passable to other processes via
sendmsg(2) and are preserved across fork(2); in both cases the
descriptors refer to the same counter from both processes. Unless
O_CLOEXEC flag was specified, the created file descriptor will remain
open across execve(2) system calls; see close(2), fcntl(2) and O_CLOEXEC
description.
eventfd_read() and eventfd_write() are thin wrappers around read(2) and
write(2) system calls, provided for compatibility with glibc.
RETURN VALUES
If successful, eventfd() returns a non-negative integer, termed a file
descriptor. It returns -1 on failure, and sets errno to indicate the
error.
The eventfd_read() and eventfd_write() functions return 0 if the
operation succeeded, -1 otherwise.
ERRORS
eventfd() may fail with:
[EINVAL] The flags argument given to eventfd() has unknown bits
set.
[EMFILE] The process has already reached its limit for open
file descriptors.
[ENFILE] The system file table is full.
[ENOMEM] No memory was available to create the kernel object.
SEE ALSO
close(2), kqueue(2), poll(2), read(2), select(2), write(2)
STANDARDS
The eventfd() system call is non-standard. It is present in Linux.
HISTORY
The eventfd() system call first appeared in FreeBSD 13.0.
FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p11 October 8, 2020 FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p11