linux pcap blocking and cpu utilization

[four <suroot () gmail com>]

Hello All,

It seems the issue of linux timeouts and blocking  has been discussed
on this list before. The issue is that the pcap calls won't return
after a timeout period on linux and some other operating systems.

Here is the situation: I am trying to build a simple bridging program.
If I  use pcap_set_nonblock() the function call returns fine, but the
program ends up using 100% cpu utilization, presumably because it is
simply looping  and returning with no packets caught. So the other way
is to just have the call wait for a certain packet count. But this
doesn't work either because if no packets are coming one way down the
wire, but we have recieved some in the other direction, the (singly
threaded) program will block on the one direction. So I want to make a
simple program that listens and forwards on two interfaces... what is
the proper way to implement this on linux so that it doesn't use all
the CPU and doesn't require multiple threads?

Thanks...

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