select() returns EINVAL if you try to feed it a value of FD_SETSIZE greater
that 256. You can apparently adjust this by specifying a larger value of
FD_SETSIZE when configuring your kernel. However, if you set the maximum
number of open file descriptors per process to some value greater than
the FD_SETSIZE value that select() expects, many selects() within the RPC
library code will be botched because _rpc_dtablesize() will return
invalid numbers. This is to say that it will return the upper descriptor
table size limit which can be much higher than 256. Unless select() is
prepared to expect this 'unusually' high value, it will fail. (A good
example of this can be seen with NIS enabled: if you type 'unlimit' at
the shell prompt and then run any command that does NIS calls, you'll
be bombarded with errors from clnttcp_create().)
A temporary fix for this is to clamp the value returned by _rpc_dtablesize()
at FD_SETSIZE (as defined in <sys/types.h> (256)). I suppose the Right
Thing would be to provide some mechanism for select() to dynamically
adjust itself to handle FD_SETSIZE values larger than 256, but it's a
bit late in the game for that. Hopefully 256 file descriptors will be enough
to keep RPC happy for now.
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