[TUHS] signals and blocked in I/O

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

Right... that's one of the reasons we created AST's and tried to get them
in the POSIX spec and an alternative to signals.  Instead of trying to
'fix' them, we decided to  inject a new scheme with better semantics (like
being queued, prioritized, guaranteed to be delivered).  They were *.4 for
a while and got replaced with sigqueue which sort helps but does not solve
the issues.

I'm always torn, do you add a new interface and risk bloat, or try to
extend the old.   We never did it in RTU, but talked about it for Stellix
(and never did it there either), but we toyed with making AST's the kernel
primitive and then trying to build signals from them in a user space
library -> which at the time, we thought you can do.  Although there are
some strange side effects of signals that you would have really think
through.   They have been extended again with POSIX and SVR4 so I'm not so
sure,

It's hard because if I/O (like DMA) is in progress, what are the proper
semantics to exit/roll back?   When do you stop the transfer and what
happens.   When doing direct to/from disk (like a in a real-time system),
this can get tricky.

Traditional UNIX semantics were that when a DMA was started, the process is
blocked at high priority until the I/O completes.   Which is fine in the
standard case, but begs the question of what happens when things go south.
signals match an easy implementation of the V6 kernel.    BSD did try to
fix them a little, but we all know that caused as many issues as it solved.

Clem

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 10:53 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 10:44 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> Does anyone remember the reason that processes blocked in I/O don't catch
>> signals?  When did that become a thing, was that part of the original
>> design or did that happen in BSD?
>>
>> I'm asking because I'm banging on FreeBSD and I can wedge it hard, to
>> the point that it won't recover, by just beating on tons of memory.
>
>
> My understanding was that signal delivery only happens when the process is
> *running* in the kernel. If the process is sleeping on IO then it's not
> running, so the signal isn't delivered.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
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