Compilation Error on SmartOS/Illumos/OpenIndiana

[Jason Madden]

Hi all,

I'm a maintainer of the Python gevent library which wraps libev. Recently, we received a bug report [1] from a user claiming compilation issues on SmartOS [2], which is a variant of OpenIndiana/Illumos [3], the open versions of Solaris. 

Specifically, it turns out that Illumos now ships with an implementation of `inotify` [4], including the header and init function. This is detected by the `configure` script and EV_USE_INOTIFY is defined. However, the Illumos definition for `struct statfs` is incompatible with the Linux version, so compilation fails.

This has been reported as a problem with other software, for example one of Facebook's projects at [5]. In that project, they were able to make a code change to prefer the port backend and ignore the inotify support. This seems better than hacking on `configure` as reported to gevent and to Facebook. It looks to me like this should be possible in ev.c as well using something like the following patch (setting EV_USE_INOTIFY to 0 if the Solaris port watchers are detected):


--- a/libev/ev.c
+++ b/libev/ev.c
@@ -127,6 +127,7 @@
 # endif

 # if HAVE_PORT_H && HAVE_PORT_CREATE
+#  define EV_USE_INOTIFY 0
 #  ifndef EV_USE_PORT
 #   define EV_USE_PORT EV_FEATURE_BACKENDS
 #  endif

I'm not able to test this and I haven't gotten feedback from our user. Has anyone run into this before and solved it in a better way? If not, does this seem like a reasonable approach? Or should this particular platform not be considered supported at this time?

Thanks,
Jason


[1] https://github.com/gevent/gevent/pull/711
[2] https://smartos.org
[3] http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+Home
[4] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/master/usr/src/uts/common/io/inotify.c
[5] https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues/84