Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years

[roger peppe <rogpeppe@gmail.com>]

2009/4/21 erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>:
>> plan 9 and inferno rely quite heavily on having flush,
>> and it's sometimes notable when servers don't implement it.
>> for instance, inferno's file2chan provides no facility
>> for flush notification, and wm/sh uses file2chan; thus if you
>> kill a process that's reading from wm/sh's /dev/cons,
>> the read goes ahead anyway, and a line of input is lost
>> (you might have seen this if you ever used os(1)).
>
> isn't the race still there, just with a smaller window of
> oppertunity?

sure, there's always a race if you allow flush.
(but at least the results are well defined regardless
of the winner).

i was trying to point out that if you try to
ignore the issue by removing flush from the
protocol, you'll get a system that doesn't work so smoothly.