When Mac OS X first launched they did so without an existing poll function. They later added poll() in Mac OS X 10.3, but we quickly discovered that it was broken (it returned a non-zero value when asked to wait for nothing) so in the curl project we added a check in configure for that and subsequently avoided using poll() in all OS X versions to and including Mac OS 10.8 (Darwin 12). The code would instead switch to the alternative solution based on select() for these platforms.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” in October 2013, Apple had fixed their poll() implementation and we’ve built libcurl to use it since with no issues at all. The configure script picks the correct underlying function to use.

Enter macOS 10.12 (yeah, its not called OS X anymore) “Sierra”, released in September 2016. Quickly we discovered that poll() once against did not act like it should and we are back to disabling the use of it in preference to the backup solution using select().

The new error looks similar to the old problem: when there’s nothing to wait for and we ask poll() to wait N milliseconds, the 10.12 version of poll() returns immediately without waiting. Causing busy-loops. The problem has been reported to Apple and its Radar number is 28372390. (There has been no news from them on how they plan to act on this.)

poll() is defined by POSIX and The Single Unix Specification it specifically says:

If none of the defined events have occurred on any selected file descriptor, poll() waits at least timeout milliseconds for an event to occur on any of the selected file descriptors.

We pushed a configure check for this in curl, to be part of the upcoming 7.51.0 release. I’ll also show you a small snippet you can use stand-alone below.

Apple is hardly alone in the broken-poll department. Remember how Windows’ WSApoll is broken?

Here’s a little code snippet that can detect the 10.12 breakage:

#include <poll.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/time.h>

int main(void)
{
  struct timeval before, after;
  int rc;
  size_t us;

  gettimeofday(&before, NULL);
  rc = poll(NULL, 0, 500);
  gettimeofday(&after, NULL);

  us = (after.tv_sec - before.tv_sec) * 1000000 +
    (after.tv_usec - before.tv_usec);

  if(us < 400000) {
    puts("poll() is broken");
    return 1;
  }
  else {
    puts("poll() works");
  }
  return 0;
}

Follow-up, January 2017

This poll bug has been confirmed fixed in the macOS 10.12.2 update (released on December 13, 2016), but I’ve found no official mention or statement about this fact.