I want to wait on both a file descriptor and a mutex, what's the recommended way to do this?

Question

I would like to spawn off threads to perform certain tasks, and use a thread-safe queue to communicate with them. I would also like to be doing IO to a variety of file descr

Answer 1

You have the Linux tag so I am going to throw this out: POSIX Message Queues do all this, which should fulfill your "built-in" request if not your less desired cross-platform wish.

The thread-safe synchronization is built-in. You can have your worker threads block on read of the queue. Alternatively MQs can use mq_notify() to spawn a new thread (or signal an existing one) when there is a new item put in the queue. And since it looks like you are going to be using select(), MQ's identifier (mqd_t) can be used as a file descriptor with select.