epoll_wait takes a timeout, which if 0 means it will return immediately even if no events are pending.

You wouldn't necessarily need to make use of this feature to implement something like Go's scheduler. Jumping to the semantics of epoll skips most of the interesting bits about how Goroutines work. The source code will always beat a blog post. If you're curious, you could work backwards from here: https://go.dev/src/runtime/netpoll_epoll.go Note that interface does indeed expose the timeout argument to the higher-level scheduling code; see line 92.