On 2020-08-15 22:46, Mouse wrote:
When I install a SIGCHLD handler via sigaction() using SA_SIGINFO, is it guaranteed that my handler is called (at least) once per death-of-a-child?"Maybe." It depends on how portable you want to be. Historically, "no": in some older systems, a second SIGCHLD delivered when there's already one pending delivery gets, lost same as any other signal. Then someone - POSIX? SVR4? I don't know - decided to invent a flavour of signal that's more like writes to a pipe: multiple of them can be pending at once. Some systems decided this was sane and implemented it. Personally, I don't like it; I think signals should be much like hardware interrupts in that a second instance happening before the first is serviced gets silently merged.
While we're on this topic. Unix signals don't exactly work like hardware interrupts anyhow, I suspect, and it's a thing that have constantly befuddled me. As far as I can tell, there is a problematic race condition in the old signal mechanism, and that is the reason (I believe) why the new semantics were introduced).
The problem goes like this:You have two child processes. One exit, and you get into your signal handler. In there you then call wait to reap the child and process things. You then call wait again, and repeat until there are no children left to reap, as you only get one signal, even if you get multiple children that exits. When no more unreaped children exist, you exit the signal handler, and a new signal can be delivered.
However, what happens if the second child exists between the call to wait, and the exit from the signal handler? It would seem the signal would get lost, since we are in the process of handling the signal, and a new signal is not delivered during this time.
In real hardware this usually don't happen, because the actual interrupt request can be reissued by the device while you are in the interrupt handler. There are some hardware interrupt designs, with edge triggered interrupts, where similar problems can exist, and those you have to be very careful with how you handle them so you don't get to the same kind of race condition.
Now, have I misunderstood something about how non-queued signal handling works, or is/was there a problem there?
Johnny
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