[tpm] fork and blessed hash references

[Fulko Hew]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Rob Janes <janes.rob at gmail.com> wrote:
... snip ...


> there is an alternative process.  set a signal handler for one of the
> user signals SIGUSR1 say.  Send a signal to that process and handler
> to reset the timer.  Your SIGALRM handler then is in a process which
> also has a SIGUSR1 handler.  The SIGUSR1 handler resets the timer.
> This way you don't need shared memory or semaphores.  Much easier,
> much less complicated.  All that needs to be known globally is the pid
> (process id) and maybe the tid (thread id) of the SIGUSR1 handler.
>

The caveat  for using signals, is that they interrupt whatever might be
going on,
which is good, but if you were in the middle of a read or write (like to a
socket
or a file), the call to read, write, etc. can be interrupted.  So if you are
not looking
at their return values (which sometimes tells you how much was 'actually'
read or written), you might find out that the 'whole' buffer wasn't
processed
and you have to handle that (outstanding) fragment yourself.  But thats just
good programming anyway.  But its not normally a condition you need to
consider... if there is no way your application _could_ get interrupted.
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