signal handler function in multithreaded environment

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  • Signal handlers are per-process state – that is, all the threads in a process share the same set of installed signal handler functions.
  • Signal masks are per-thread state. Signals can be blocked or unblocked on a per-thread basis.
  • Signals can be process- or thread-directed. If a signal is process-directed, then an arbitrary thread which does not currently have the signal type blocked is chosen to handle it.

A simple way to handle signals in a multi-threaded application is to create one thread as a dedicated signal-handling thread. All signals of interest are blocked in every thread; no signal handlers are established; and the signal-handling thread calls sigwaitinfo() in a loop, acting on the signals as they’re received.

This means that you don’t need to worry about whether the functions you want to call are async-signal-safe or not, because signals aren’t handled in signal handlers – they’re handled synchronously by your dedicated signal-handling thread, which can call any function it likes (for example, it can use the ordinary pthreads synchronisation functions to wake up another thread).

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