I don't know if this helps, but I found the following with a little searching:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-async/

select on unixlikes work on any filedescriptor not just network sockets. You can use stdin as the descriptor in select to allow non-blocking input.

Quote:Original post by directNoob
I need to read key strokes under linux and the os is not running on x86 hardware.
Does anyone know how to do that?

Correct answer: write a device driver and add it to the kernel, preferrably as a module.

Using one of the select() family (select(), poll(), epoll(), etc) can be used to read from stdin on some other file descriptor in non-blocking mode. If you read from stdin you're getting input cooked by the tty driver. You can use fcntl() to adjust the tty to deliver raw data instead of cooked data, but you're still not reading keystrokes, you're getting, um, sushi (as in, it's raw data that's been prepared by an expert).

The only way to actually read keystrokes is to talk to the keyboard device directly, which can only be done from kernel mode. Unless you're using, say, a USB keyboard or a dumb terminal over a serial line (remember the days!) or maybe a remote user channeling X over SSH.

My guess is what you really want is a stty()/select() kind of combo to read the raw data from stdin. There are libraries that will do that for you (eg. ncurses, SDL, X11).