Gathering signals in bulk enables server applications to drain a signal
queue (almost full of realtime signals) more efficiently by reducing the
syscall and file look-up overhead.
Very similar to the sigtimedwait4() call described by Niels Provos, Chuck
Lever, and Stephen Tweedie in a paper entitled "Analyzing the Overload
Behavior of a Simple Web Server". The paper lists more details and
advantages.
Signed-off-by: Davi E. M. Arnaut <davi@haxent.com.br>
Acked-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch series implements the new signalfd() system call.
I took part of the original Linus code (and you know how badly it can be
broken :), and I added even more breakage ;) Signals are fetched from the same
signal queue used by the process, so signalfd will compete with standard
kernel delivery in dequeue_signal(). If you want to reliably fetch signals on
the signalfd file, you need to block them with sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK). This
seems to be working fine on my Dual Opteron machine. I made a quick test
program for it:
http://www.xmailserver.org/signafd-test.c
The signalfd() system call implements signal delivery into a file descriptor
receiver. The signalfd file descriptor if created with the following API:
int signalfd(int ufd, const sigset_t *mask, size_t masksize);
The "ufd" parameter allows to change an existing signalfd sigmask, w/out going
to close/create cycle (Linus idea). Use "ufd" == -1 if you want a brand new
signalfd file.
The "mask" allows to specify the signal mask of signals that we are interested
in. The "masksize" parameter is the size of "mask".
The signalfd fd supports the poll(2) and read(2) system calls. The poll(2)
will return POLLIN when signals are available to be dequeued. As a direct
consequence of supporting the Linux poll subsystem, the signalfd fd can use
used together with epoll(2) too.
The read(2) system call will return a "struct signalfd_siginfo" structure in
the userspace supplied buffer. The return value is the number of bytes copied
in the supplied buffer, or -1 in case of error. The read(2) call can also
return 0, in case the sighand structure to which the signalfd was attached,
has been orphaned. The O_NONBLOCK flag is also supported, and read(2) will
return -EAGAIN in case no signal is available.
If the size of the buffer passed to read(2) is lower than sizeof(struct
signalfd_siginfo), -EINVAL is returned. A read from the signalfd can also
return -ERESTARTSYS in case a signal hits the process. The format of the
struct signalfd_siginfo is, and the valid fields depends of the (->code &
__SI_MASK) value, in the same way a struct siginfo would:
struct signalfd_siginfo {
__u32 signo; /* si_signo */
__s32 err; /* si_errno */
__s32 code; /* si_code */
__u32 pid; /* si_pid */
__u32 uid; /* si_uid */
__s32 fd; /* si_fd */
__u32 tid; /* si_fd */
__u32 band; /* si_band */
__u32 overrun; /* si_overrun */
__u32 trapno; /* si_trapno */
__s32 status; /* si_status */
__s32 svint; /* si_int */
__u64 svptr; /* si_ptr */
__u64 utime; /* si_utime */
__u64 stime; /* si_stime */
__u64 addr; /* si_addr */
};
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix signalfd_copyinfo() on i386]
Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Davi Arnaut