Operational semantics for signal handling

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• Maxim Strygin, University of Birmingham
• Tuesday 28 August 2012, 12:00-13:00
• CS 217.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dan Ghica.

Signals are a lightweight form of interprocess communication in Unix. When a process receives a signal, the control flow is interrupted and a previously installed signal handler is run. Signal handling is reminiscent both of exception handling and concurrent interleaving of processes. In this paper, we investigate different approaches to formalizing signal handling in operational semantics, and compare them in a series of examples. We find the big-step style of operational semantics to be well suited to modelling signal handling. We integrate exception handling with our big-step semantics of signal handling, by adopting the exception convention as defined in the Definition of Standard ML. The semantics needs to capture the complex interactions between signal handling and exception handling.

This talk is part of the Lab Lunch series.

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• CS 217
• Lab Lunch

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