wpa_supplicant only works with a non_blocking raw socket

Hi folks,

I am using a wpa_supplicant for fedora with madwifi driver to simulate
multiple wireless clients. It creates multiple virtual interfaces over
a physical wireless i/f.

Each virtual wireless client is a process and opens a raw socket
connection to receive/send 802.11 packets.

The problem I am facing is that each process has to poll the socket,
to check if a packet matching its MAC address has arrived. It only
works if the socket is non-blocking. If I make the socket blocking and
use select(), none of the process receive any packets over raw socket.
I am not able to figure out the reason for this behaviour and also you
may agree that polling is a clumsy design. Appreciate if someone could
shed some light on this behaviour and suggest better ideas to overcome
this problem.

Thanks,
syuga