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

It seems nobody has mentioned this option yet:

Don't run select/poll/etc. in your "main thread". Start a dedicated secondary thread which does the I/O and pushes notifications into your thread-safe queue (the same queue which your other threads use to communicate with the main thread) when I/O operations complete.

Then your main thread just needs to wait on the notification queue.