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From: std-unix@ut-sally.UUCP (Moderator, John Quarterman)
Newsgroups: mod.std.unix
Subject: Re: Is SIGILL omitted from the list of "hardware" signals for good reason?
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Date: Thu, 14-Nov-85 04:41:02 EST
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Posted: Thu Nov 14 04:41:02 1985
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Date: Sun, 10 Nov 85 16:04:35 PST
From: mordor!lll-crg!sun!guy (Guy Harris)

> Was this deliberately omitted - in which case I object, as
> a SIGILL is quite likely the best choice for SIGABRT...

Not necessarily; 4.xBSD happened to choose it for the VAX, because there's
no IOT instruction, but VAX S5's "abort" routine is a (portable!) piece of C
code which does

	kill(getpid(), SIGIOT);

(and also flushes all the Standard I/O buffers beforehand).  SIGIOT is
pretty useless except on PDP-11s; the S5 shell says "abort - core dumped"
rather than "IOT trap - core dumped" when a process gets a SIGIOT.

I think 4.xBSD should adopt S5's "abort" routine.

Volume-Number: Volume 3, Number 12