Repeating timerfd event works with epoll and not with poll - c

Question

I am implementing a timer using timerfd. This is a relative timer that I just need to repeat forever at the rate it is set to. I want to poll on this event and originally tried using poll. When I did this, I would see the timer event the first time and then never again. However, when I changed to using epoll (no change at all to how the timerfd was set up) it works as expected.
Here is the code with poll:
#include <sys/timerfd.h>
#include <sys/poll.h>
#include <sys/epoll.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <strings.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(int ac, char *av[])
{
struct pollfd p;
int timerfd;
struct itimerspec timerValue;
/* clear pollfd */
bzero(&p, sizeof(p));
/* set timerfd */
timerfd = timerfd_create(CLOCK_REALTIME, 0);
if (timerfd < 0) {
printf("failed to create timer fd\n");
exit(1);
}
bzero(&timerValue, sizeof(timerValue));
timerValue.it_value.tv_sec = 1;
timerValue.it_value.tv_nsec = 0;
timerValue.it_interval.tv_sec = 1;
timerValue.it_interval.tv_nsec = 0;
/* set events */
p.fd = timerfd;
p.revents = 0;
p.events = POLLIN;
/* start timer */
if (timerfd_settime(timerfd, 0, &timerValue, NULL) < 0) {
printf("could not start timer\n");
exit(1);
}
/* wait for events */
while (1) {
int numEvents = poll(&p, 1, -1);
if (numEvents > 0) {
int timersElapsed = 0;
(void) read(p.fd, &timersElapsed, 8);
printf("timers elapsed: %d\n", timersElapsed);
}
}
exit(0);
}
And here is the code with epoll:
#include <sys/timerfd.h>
#include <sys/poll.h>
#include <sys/epoll.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <strings.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(int ac, char *av[])
{
struct epoll_event epollEvent;
struct epoll_event newEvents;
int timerfd;
int epollfd;
struct itimerspec timerValue;
/* set timerfd */
timerfd = timerfd_create(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, 0);
if (timerfd < 0) {
printf("failed to create timer fd\n");
exit(1);
}
bzero(&timerValue, sizeof(timerValue));
timerValue.it_value.tv_sec = 1;
timerValue.it_value.tv_nsec = 0;
timerValue.it_interval.tv_sec = 1;
timerValue.it_interval.tv_nsec = 0;
/* set events */
epollfd = epoll_create1(0);
epollEvent.events = EPOLLIN;
epollEvent.data.fd = timerfd;
epoll_ctl(epollfd, EPOLL_CTL_ADD, timerfd, &epollEvent);
/* start timer */
if (timerfd_settime(timerfd, 0, &timerValue, NULL) < 0) {
printf("could not start timer\n");
exit(1);
}
/* wait for events */
while (1) {
int numEvents = epoll_wait(epollfd, &newEvents, 1, 0);
if (numEvents > 0) {
int timersElapsed = 0;
(void) read(epollEvent.data.fd, &timersElapsed, 8);
printf("timers elapsed: %d\n", timersElapsed);
}
}
exit(0);
}
Any idea what I might be doing wrong with poll? Maybe it is not meant to be used this way with a timerfd? Thank you.

Answer 1

Ok, this is an old question, but nevertheless. The problem lies in these lines of code:
int timersElapsed = 0;
(void) read(p.fd, &timersElapsed, 8);
printf("timers elapsed: %d\n", timersElapsed);
int timersElapsed is 4 bytes. Reading 8 bytes into this results in a stack overflow, giving unpredictable behaviour.
Changing timersElapsed to a long int and fixing the printf did the trick for me.
long int timersElapsed = 0;
(void) read(p.fd, &timersElapsed, 8);
printf("timers elapsed: %ld\n", timersElapsed);

Answer 2

This appears to be an issue with Fedora (or my installation of Fedora). That system is running 3.16, and poll() does not work.
However, on a separate Ubuntu installation with 3.13, the poll() code above works just fine. As I will be using Ubuntu in the future anyway, I will not try to track down the issue on Fedora. Though I am curious if others are seeing this same issue on Fedora systems.

Answer 3

I faced the same problem.
After debugging, the root cause in poll example is that
timerValue should be declared as uint64_t.
- int timersElapsed = 0;
+ uint64_t timersElapsed = 0;
The man page of timerfd_create() describes this.
Operating on a timer file descriptor
The file descriptor returned by timerfd_create() supports the following
operations:
read(2)
If the timer has already expired one or more times since its settings
were last modified using timerfd_settime(), or since the last suc‐
cessful read(2), then the buffer given to read(2) returns an unsigned
8-byte integer (uint64_t) containing the number of expirations that
have occurred. (The returned value is in host byte order—that is,
the native byte order for integers on the host machine.)