Re: stopping of translators

[Mark Kettenis]

   From: Roland McGrath <roland@gnu.org>
   Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 04:27:11 -0400 (EDT)

   > So the more precise question is: should translators quit when the last
   > reference to them is gone?

   It is up to the translator to decide when it is safe and desireable to shut
   down when there are no users.  The general plan is to do this after a
   timeout, but the implementations are not entirely consistent.  Look at the
   calls to ports_manage_* and the code around them--those functions take
   arguments for the timeout value and return when the timeout expires.  After
   that, the server code must ascertain if there are no user ports and if so
   it can to decide to exit.

I believe that in the current code, the actual timeouts are disabled,
i.e. all started threads are kept forever, and no translator will ever
terminate when linked with the current libports.  Enabling the
timeouts isn't too difficult, but when I did so somewhere in the past,
I encountered some bugs.  One of them an off-by-one problem that
terminated the last thread listening for requests.  Sorry, I don't
have the details right now.  Could look them up off course :-).

Mark