proxying from pipes

[Jeff Kaufman]

My module wants to sit in the filter chain passing buffers to an
asynchronous optimization thread and then send them out to the user
when they finish.  When a request comes in I have my module roughly
doing:

body filter:
 - if first set of buffers
   - create pipe, pass pipe_write_fd to optimization thread
 - pass all input data to optimization thread
 - don't call ngx_http_next_body_filter

Is there a way I can ask nginx to watch this pipe and treat any data
appearing on the pipe as if it is output from my body filter?  Passing
it through ngx_http_next_body_filter, etc?  And finalizing the request
if there's a problem with the pipe?

What I'm doing now is:
 - when creating the pipe
     c = ngx_get_connection(pipe_read_fd, r->connection->log);
     c.read->handler = my_read_handler;
     ngx_add_event(c->read, NGX_READ_EVENT, 0);
 - when my_read_handler is called
     read() from pipe_read_fd
     create buffer, chain link
     call ngx_http_next_body_filter

Is this the right way to go about this?  It seems very low level and I
would expect proxying from a pipe would be something nginx already
supported.

Another option would be to simply use the pipe for notification and
load the data from the optimization thread through shared memory.

Jeff