Yeah, but this sounds even worse than that, since it was never truly readable at all, but merely has a sockopt ready to be gotten... *shrug* It just sounds like an ugly kluge to me...

How about just treating the socket as if it were a listening socket, and use accept() to return the FD (and fill the other related necessary info into the returned client sockaddr)? Then, readability on the listener fits the already established model for normal listening sockets, to indicate a new connection to accept, and no need for any klugey FD passing behavior... Of course, returning a non-socket FD from accept() is probably just as ugly a kluge, I suppose... *shrug*