Re: What happened to alarm()?

[Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 06:18:39PM +0100, Gisle Vanem wrote:
> Why has the use of alarm() been removed from the 3.8 version
> of getname()? Non-portable issue?

I *think* it was picked up from OpenBSD, where I *suspect* it was done
because it's unsafe to do very much in a signal handler and the concern
was that longjmping out of a signal handler could leave some part of the
application or libraries in an inconsistent state.  (This is
*definitely* a problem on Mac OS X, for example, where Ethereal, which
still does the alarm()/longjmp stuff, can sometimes *crash* if you
longjmp out of a host name lookup.)

> Latest tcpdump is rather slow at exiting from a SIGINT now and 
> even more so with the new pcap_break_loop().

"pcap_break_loop()" shouldn't make things worse; I'll look at that.
-
This is the TCPDUMP workers list. It is archived at
http://www.tcpdump.org/lists/workers/index.html
To unsubscribe use mailto:tcpdump-workers-request () tcpdump org?body=unsubscribe