I am working on signals in C programming. I have parent process and 5 child processes, I am trying to send SIGUSR2 from child processes to parent process when they are done some calculations while parent waits for them with sigsuspend(). When all 5 child processes sends SIGUSR2, parent process continues its work. I increment a global variable in the signal handler function to do so. Sometimes it runs fine but sometimes parent process gets stuck waiting.
Can one of you guys help me with a better solution approach rather than counting the signals received (I must use signals for synchronization)?
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Answer
To the best of my knowledge, you can’t use signals for that. If two signals of the same kind are sent to a process before it gets scheduled to handle the first one, it will only see one signal. Think of it as a bit mask, there is one bit for each pending signal, and when the process gets scheduled it will receive them all. But if it is waiting for some other process, and a signal for which the bit in the mask is already set, then nothing more happens.
A better solution would probably be to open a pipe to each subprocess, and each of them writes a message when done. When the parent has read the message from all children, it can continue. There are other synchronisation methods, but this would probably be the simplest.