Friday, September 5, 2014

Fun with signal handlers

I recently had a couple of projects where I needed to write some signal handling code. I figured it would be helpful to write up a short article on my experiences.

The article contains two examples. The first is using a timer to write a simple profiler for an application - so you can find out what code is currently being executed. The second is potentially more esoteric - handling illegal instructions. This is probably worth explaining a bit.

When a SPARC processor hits an instruction that it does not understand, it traps. You typically see this if an application has gone off into the weeds and started executing the data segment or something. However, you can use this feature for doing something whenever the processor encounters an illegal instruction. If it's a valid instruction that isn't available on the processor, you could write emulation code. Or you could use it as a kind of break point that you insert into the code. Or you could use it to make up your own instruction set. That bit's left as an exercise for you. The article provides the template of how to do it.

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