Hi,

for quite some time I am already looking at the right
set of concepts for a platform abstraction layer that
preserves most of the good capabilities of both the Win32
API but also the standard UNIX programming API. In particlar
I am looking for these features:
1. Wait on heterogeneous kernel objects. Windows allows for that
I can wait on a kernel mutex, a socket handle and a thread
or process handle at the same time.
The standard UNIX API only allows to wait on *either*
IPC objects (semaphores for instance) *or* on file descriptors.

2. Windows limits the number of handles I can wait on to
64 whereas Unix/Linux have a much higher number of file
descriptors I can wait on via poll or select.

Wine emulates the Win32 API by putting the OS style state into
a process and API calls are translated into roundtrips (via a pipe)
to this server process.

I have had a discussion with a co-worker already on putting such
state in shared memory and have processes formulate their wait
condition in shared memory and each process performing a modification
would need to check and wake up waiting processes according to
their wait condition.

Has anybody investigated concepts along these lines?

"Wine emulates the Win32 API by putting the OS style state into
a process and API calls are translated into roundtrips (via a pipe)
to this server process."

"I have had a discussion with a co-worker already on putting such
state in shared memory and have processes formulate their wait
condition in shared memory and each process performing a modification would need to check and wake up waiting processes according to their wait condition."

In order to move from the first type of processing to the second You must have a hardware instruction available which both tests the wait condition and if necessary places the process in a wait state, all within the one instruction.

-------------------
Steve Stites

Hi -

You might want to have a look at "APR", the Apache Portable Runtime Project:

http://apr.apache.org/

It's a mature, comprehensive, highly regarded "abstraction layer" that probably already has most of what you're looking for.