Remember all those antics last month with alternate signal stacks and SIGSTKSZ and the rest#

Wed, 07 Aug 2002 01:43:38 +0000

Remember all those antics last month with alternate signal stacks and SIGSTKSZ and the rest of it?

       starting address and size  of  the  stack.   The  constant
       SIGSTKSZ  is defined to be large enough to cover the usual
       size requirements for an alternate signal stack,  and  the
       constant  MINSIGSTKSZ defines the minimum size required to
       execute a signal handler.

SIGSTKSZ on x86 linux with whatever version of glibc I have installed here (2.2? whatever debian unstable has in it last month), is not actually big enough to call printf. Granted this is in general not a completely great idea anyway as printf is probably not reentrant, but it is somewhat disconcerting to switch on the "debug cold init by spewing messages to stderr" switch and get a whole different (and rather faster) failure mode.

We do entire garbage collections inside signal handlers (admittedly not on x86, so this specific problem doesn't arise there). Why do I feel queasy about this?