Ceci n’est pas une pipe

Signals on many platforms are completely not-thread safe, this being due to the delivery by an interrupt which can halt execution mid-way through a function call. Checking the man page signal(2) POSIX.1-2003 lists safe functions to call in a signal handler:

_Exit() _exit() abort() accept() access() aio_error() aio_return() aio_suspend() alarm() bind() cfgetispeed() cfgetospeed() cfsetispeed() cfsetospeed() chdir() chmod() chown() clock_gettime() close() connect() creat() dup() dup2() execle() execve() fchmod() fchown() fcntl() fdatasync() fork() fpathconf() fstat() fsync() ftruncate() getegid() geteuid() getgid() getgroups() getpeername() getpgrp() getpid() getppid() getsockname() getsockopt() getuid() kill() link() listen() lseek() lstat() mkdir() mkfifo() open() pathconf() pause() pipe() poll() posix_trace_event() pselect() raise() read() readlink() recv() recvfrom() recvmsg() rename() rmdir() select() sem_post() send() sendmsg() sendto() setgid() setpgid() setsid() setsockopt() setuid() shutdown() sigaction() sigaddset() sigdelset() sigemptyset() sigfillset() sigismember() signal() sigpause() sigpending() sigprocmask() sigqueue() sigset() sigsuspend() sleep() socket() socketpair() stat() symlink() sysconf() tcdrain() tcflow() tcflush() tcgetattr() tcgetpgrp() tcsendbreak() tcsetattr() tcsetpgrp() time() timer_getoverrun() timer_gettime() timer_settime() times() umask() uname() unlink() utime() wait() waitpid() write()

The popular method to handle signals is then through a pipe to an event loop, read "Catching Unix signals" for a Gtk example.

Using pipes is also a popular mechanism for multiple threads to communicate with each other, with the PGM transport the application needs to be notified only when contiguous data is available, handling of out of order sequence numbers and NAK requests should be transparent. However it only need be used as a thread-safe signalling mechanism, so for zero-copy we simply use a shared memory structure for the actual data to pass, in this case via a Glib asynchronous queue. A pipe can be used in a select() or poll() call, the thread can then sleep until data is available, otherwise a constant loop checking shared memory would be necessary with the side effect of starving other threads of processor time.