my question: in Linux (and in FreeBsd, and generally in UNIX) is it possible/legal to read single file descriptor simultaneously from two threads?
I did some search but found nothing, although a lot of people ask like question about reading/writing from/to socket fd at the same time (meaning reading when other thread is writing, not reading when other is reading). I also have read some man pages and got no clear answer on my question.
Why I ask it. I tried to implement simple program that counts lines in stdin, like wc -l. I actually was testing my home-made C++ io engine for overhead, and discovered that wc is 1.7 times faster. I trimmed down some C++ and came closer to wc speed but didn't reach it. Then I experimented with input buffer size, optimized it, but still wc is clearly a bit faster. Finally I created 2 threads which read same STDIN_FILENO in parallel, and this at last was faster than wc! But lines count became incorrect... so I suppose some junk comes from reads which is unexpected. Doesn't kernel care what process read?
Edit: I did some research and discovered just that calling read directly via syscall does not change anything. Kernel code seem to do some sync handling, but i didnt understand much (read_write.c)