fopen() will block if the file to be opened is a fifo. This is true whether it's opened in "r" or "w" mode. (See man 7 fifo: this is the correct, default behaviour; although Linux supports non-blocking fopen() of a fifo, PHP doesn't).
The consequence of this is that you can't discover whether an initial fifo read/write would block because to do that you need stream_select(), which in turn requires that fopen() has happened!