1 research outputs found
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, 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.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2012, arXiv:1208.244