Operational semantics for signal handling

Signals are a lightweight form of interprocess communication in Unix. When a process receives a signal, the control flow is interrupted and a previously installed signal handler is run. Signal handling is reminiscent both of exception handling and concurrent interleaving of processes. In this paper,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2012-08
Main Authors: Strygin, Maxim, Thielecke, Hayo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Exception handling
Logic programming
Semantics
Signal processing
UNIX
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Signals are a lightweight form of interprocess communication in Unix. When a process receives a signal, the control flow is interrupted and a previously installed signal handler is run. Signal handling is reminiscent both of exception handling and concurrent interleaving of processes. In this paper, we investigate different approaches to formalizing signal handling in operational semantics, and compare them in a series of examples. We find the big-step style of operational semantics to be well suited to modelling signal handling. We integrate exception handling with our big-step semantics of signal handling, by adopting the exception convention as defined in the Definition of Standard ML. The semantics needs to capture the complex interactions between signal handling and exception handling.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1208.2754