[coyotos-dev] Sleep for interval

[Christopher Nelson]

>
>
> > A different question might be: should it be possible for the invocation
> > to have a timeout? I do not like timeouts in IPC in general, but I am
> > beginning to suspect that I will eventually be forced (reluctantly) to
> > compromise on this issue.
>
> If IPC's could have timeouts, then timeouts could easily subsume sleep.
> Just have a capability that always blocks and do a request on it with a
> timeout.  You'd nicely have memory where you need it to arrange things
> kernel side.  Proxying would change, as it wouldn't have any knowledge
> of this.  Not sure how much of a problem proxying is though.
>

I am a fan of not having timeouts.  Many of the problems I am confronted
with in my job involve programmers assuming that "this operation will
*never* take longer than X time units."  Then it invariably does in a
situation they didn't anticipate, and the software fails in a really
unexpected way.

On the other hand, there are places where it seems impossible to get away
from timeouts.  As an example, trying to connect to an unresponsive host.
You will never get a "fail" message.  At some point you have to stop trying.

With respect to IPC, I don't see a need for timeouts unless it is possible
for a receiver to ignore a sender.  If every receiver must response
positively or negatively to a message, then you don't need timeouts.
However, if a sender is trying to contact a receiver that is ignoring it, at
some point it either has to give up - or at the very least inform the user
somehow that things are taking longer than expected.

-={C}=-
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