It is heavily modelled after the libev API, but will never be as portable to other UNIX systems. The primary target of this project is modern embedded Linux systems. You will need kernel and C-library support for epoll(7), timerfd and signalfd.

Usage

The user initializes an event context to which timer and I/O stream watchers are registered. A typical application then enters the event loop that will only return at program termination.

The C API

The typical application will do the following steps

Prepare an event context with uev_init()
Register callbacks with uev_io_init() and uev_timer_init()
Enter the event loop with uev_run()

Note: Make sure to use non-blocking stream I/O!

Build & Install

The library is built and developed for GNU/Linux systems, as such it may use GNU GCC and GNU Make specific features. Patches to support *BSD kqueue are most welcome.

make all: The library
make test: Test and showcase
make install: Honors $prefix and $DESTDIR environment variables

Warning

Please be advised, libuev is not thread safe! It is primarily intended for use-cases where the engineer wants to avoid the use of threads. To support threads the signal handling needs to be patched first, other than that an event context per thread should be sufficient.

History and References

Libuev is a fork of the original LibUEvent by Flemming Madsen but has been completely rewritten and is now more similar to the famous libev by Mark Lehmann. Another small event library used for inspiration is the very small Picoev by Oku Kazuho.