Bug 66571

Summary: epoll_wait has it wrong about timeout and EINTR
Product: Documentation Reporter: Jonas Jonsson (jonas)
Component: man-pagesAssignee: documentation_man-pages (documentation_man-pages)
Status: RESOLVED CODE_FIX    
Severity: low CC: mtk.manpages
Priority: P1    
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Kernel Version: Subsystem:
Regression: No Bisected commit-id:

Description Jonas Jonsson 2013-12-05 08:05:59 UTC 
The epoll_wait(2) man page says:

"EINTR  The call was interrupted by a signal handler before either any
        of the requested events occurred or the timeout expired; see
        signal(7)."

Looking at the code of the kernel, EINTR is only returned when there is a pending signal. If the timeout expires, it will simply return without an error.

Simply removing the "or the timeout expired" part should be enough.
Comment 1 Michael Kerrisk 2014-01-22 13:14:09 UTC 
The problem is that the wording is a little ambiguous. The meaning is this:

EINTR  The call was interrupted by a signal handler before either (1) any
       of the requested events occurred or (2) the timeout expired; see
       signal(7).

I've updated the page to have the text as shown above.