man libev-а

Читать его -- особое развлечение. Куда не поглядишь, то обязательно в
кого-то автор кинет камень:

    The epoll mechanism deserves honorable mention as the most
    misdesigned of the more advanced event mechanisms: mere
    annoyances include silently dropping file descriptors,
    requiring a system call per change per file descriptor (and
    unnecessary guessing of parameters), problems with dup,
    returning before the timeout value, resulting in additional
    iterations (and only giving 5ms accuracy while select on the
    same platform gives 0.1ms) and so on. The biggest issue is fork
    races, however - if a program forks then both parent and child
    process have to recreate the epoll set, which can take
    considerable time (one syscall per file descriptor) and is of
    course hard to detect.

    Epoll is also notoriously buggy - embedding epoll fds should
    work, but of course doesn't, and epoll just loves to report
    events for totally different file descriptors (even already
    closed ones, so one cannot even remove them from the set) than
    registered in the set (especially on SMP systems). Libev tries
    to counter these spurious notifications by employing an
    additional generation counter and comparing that against the
    events to filter out spurious ones, recreating the set when
    required. Epoll also erroneously rounds down timeouts, but
    gives you no way to know when and by how much, so sometimes you
    have to busy-wait because epoll returns immediately despite a
    nonzero timeout. And last not least, it also refuses to work
    with some file descriptors which work perfectly fine with
    "select" (files, many character devices...).

    Epoll is truly the train wreck among event poll mechanisms, a
    frankenpoll, cobbled together in a hurry, no thought to design
    or interaction with others. Oh, the pain, will it ever stop...

    [...]

    While nominally embeddable in other event loops, this feature
    is broken in all kernel versions tested so far.

Но и kqueue не отделался:

    Kqueue deserves special mention, as at the time of this
    writing, it was broken on all BSDs except NetBSD (usually it
    doesn't work reliably with anything but sockets and pipes,
    except on Darwin, where of course it's completely useless).
    Unlike epoll, however, whose brokenness is by design, these
    kqueue bugs can (and eventually will) be fixed without API
    changes to existing programs. For this reason it's not being
    "auto-detected" unless you explicitly specify it in the flags
    (i.e. using "EVBACKEND_KQUEUE") or libev was compiled on a
    known-to-be-good (-enough) system like NetBSD.

    [...]

    This backend usually performs well under most conditions.

Про Solaris:

    This uses the Solaris 10 event port mechanism. As with
    everything on Solaris, it's really slow, but it still scales
    very well (O(active_fds)).

    While this backend scales well, it requires one system call per
    active file descriptor per loop iteration. For small and medium
    numbers of file descriptors a "slow" "EVBACKEND_SELECT" or
    "EVBACKEND_POLL" backend might perform better.

    On the positive side, this backend actually performed fully to
    specification in all tests and is fully embeddable, which is a
    rare feat among the OS-specific backends (I vastly prefer
    correctness over speed hacks).

    On the negative side, the interface is bizarre - so bizarre
    that even sun itself gets it wrong in their code examples: The
    event polling function sometimes returns events to the caller
    even though an error occurred, but with no indication whether
    it has done so or not (yes, it's even documented that way) -
    deadly for edge-triggered interfaces where you absolutely have
    to know whether an event occurred or not because you have to
    re-arm the watcher.

    Fortunately libev seems to be able to work around these
    idiocies.