gnucc and signal 6

Barry Shein bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU
Sun May 7 01:02:25 AEST 1989


From: news at brian386.UUCP (Wm. Brian McCane)
>SIGIOT	06	IOT instruction
>
>(Thanks guys ;-)  Anyway, what is an IOT instruction and why would I be
>getting one during a compile.
>
>My system is MicroPort V386r3.0e.

Aha! That's your problem, an IOT is an instruction on a PDP-11, you
have the wrong machine!

What's probably happened is the compiler has called abort(3) after
detecting an internal error to try to force a core dump of itself,
abort() uses SIGIOT (sends itself a kill(0,SIGIOT) on the assumption
that it won't be used for anything else so will take the default
action and core dump.)

IOT really is a PDP-11 instruction (I/O Trap) so the name is just a
hangover tho the concept probably could have been valid (eg.
asynchronous I/O completion or I/O error) but alas they couldn't keep
their grubby little hands off it :-)
-- 

	-Barry Shein, Software Tool & Die

There's nothing more terrifying to hardware vendors than
satisfied customers.



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