reentrant functions

reentrant functions in signal

When a signal that is being caught is handled by a process, the normal sequence of instructions being executed by the process is temporarily interrupted by the signal handler. The process then continues executing, but the instructions in the signal handler are now executed. If the signal handler returns (instead of calling exit or longjmp, for example), then the normal sequence of instructions that the process was executing when the signal was caught continues executing. (This is similar to what happens when a hardware interrupt occurs.) But in the signal handler, we can't tell where the process was executing when the signal was caught. What if the process was in the middle of allocating additional memory on its heap using malloc, and we call malloc from the signal handler ?

The Single UNIX Specification specifies the functions that are guaranteed to be reentrant. Figure below lists these reentrant functions.

Reentrant functions that may be called from a signal handler

Most functions that are not in Figure above are missing because (a) they are known to use static data structures,  (b) they call malloc or free,  or (c) they are part of the standard I/O library. Most implementations of the standard I/O library use global data structures in a nonreentrant way. Note that even though we call printf from signal handlers in some of our examples, it is not guaranteed to produce the expected results, since the signal hander can interrupt a call to printf from our main program.

Be aware that even if we call a function listed in Figure above from a signal handler, there is only one errno variable per thread,  and we might modify its value. Consider a signal handler that is invoked right after main has set errno. If the signal handler calls read, for example, this call can change the value of errno, wiping out the value that was just stored in main. Therefore, as a general rule, when calling the functions listed in Figure above from a signal handler, we should save and restore errno. (Be aware that a commonly caught signal is SIGCHLD, and its signal handler usually calls one of the wait functions. All the wait functions can change errno.)

Note that longjmp  and siglongjmp are missing from Figure above, because the signal may have occurred while the main routine was updating a data structure in a nonreentrant way. This data structure could be left half updated if we call siglongjmp instead of returning from the signal handler. If it is going to do such things as update global data structures, as  we describe here, while catching signals that cause sigsetjmp to be executed, an application needs to block the signals while updating the data structures.

Example

Example Below shows a program that calls the nonreentrant function getpwnam from a signal handler that is called every second.

When this program was run, the results were random. Usually, the program would be terminated by a SIGSEGV signal when the signal handler returned after several iterations. An examination of the core file showed that the main function had called getpwnam, but that some internal pointers had been corrupted when the signal handler called the same function. Occasionally, the program would run for several seconds before crashing with a SIGSEGV error. When the main function did run correctly after the signal had been caught, the return value was sometimes corrupted and sometimes fine. Once (on Mac OS X), messages were printed from the malloc library routine warning about freeing pointers not allocated through malloc.

As shown by this example, if we call a nonreentrant function from a signal handler, the results are unpredictable.

example code : Call a nonreentrant function from a signal handler