>                                                            Should this
> be changed? Its a bit of a hardship for big event driven programs and
> similar things...

IMHO this should be changed as well as select() fixed up.
Currently you can't select on file descriptors >= 256 (so in
effect fds >= 256 are second class descriptors).  The fix is
to stop using FD_SETSIZE within the kernel (as well as
fdset_t) and allocate large enough fd_mask arrays to hold the
bits.