I would prefer extending poll to support things other than file descriptors, instead of converting everything a file descriptor to be able to use poll.
Why? The ability to block on these descriptors as a one off rather than wrapping into a poll makes them extremely useful and avoids the race issues that exist with signal handlers and other non-blocking mechanisms.
signalfd, timerfd, eventfd, userfaultfd, pidfd are all great applications of this strategy.
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Why? The ability to block on these descriptors as a one off rather than wrapping into a poll makes them extremely useful and avoids the race issues that exist with signal handlers and other non-blocking mechanisms.
signalfd, timerfd, eventfd, userfaultfd, pidfd are all great applications of this strategy.
One issue is that fds are a relatively limited and relatively heavyweight resource.
They used to be.
And `nr_open` has been 1048576 for a long time. The default quota limit is 1024 but that is easy to change.