Currently, various constants used for the poll/epoll/pollset system calls are defined multple times as public static final short constants in various Java files:

src/share/classes/sun/nio/ch/AbstractPollArrayWrapper.java:
src/solaris/classes/sun/nio/ch/Port.java

Until now, this has not been a problem because on Linux, Solaris and MacOSX these constants have the same values. However on Windows and AIX they are different.

While this hasn't been a problem on Windows either, because as far as I can see, we don't directly use WSAPoll() until now and the POLL constants are only used 'symbolically' on Windows, it became a real problem for the AIX port.

To avoid a mapping of the Java constants to the native ones every time we go from Java to Native and back, it has been suggested to make these constants platform dependant (see http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2014-January/024426.html).

This would also make it possible to directly used the WSAPoll() functionality on Windows which is available since Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms741669%28v=vs.85%29.aspx).