8

Examining the output of kill -l command

$ kill -l
1) SIGHUP    2) SIGINT   3) SIGQUIT  4) SIGILL   5) SIGTRAP
6) SIGABRT   7) SIGBUS   8) SIGFPE   9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR1
11) SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2 13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM
16) SIGSTKFLT   17) SIGCHLD 18) SIGCONT 19) SIGSTOP 20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN 22) SIGTTOU 23) SIGURG  24) SIGXCPU 25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF 28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGIO   30) SIGPWR
31) SIGSYS  34) SIGRTMIN    35) SIGRTMIN+1  36) SIGRTMIN+2  37) SIGRTMIN+3
38) SIGRTMIN+4  39) SIGRTMIN+5  40) SIGRTMIN+6  41) SIGRTMIN+7  42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9  44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12 47) SIGRTMIN+13
48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14 51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12
53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10 55) SIGRTMAX-9  56) SIGRTMAX-8  57) SIGRTMAX-7
58) SIGRTMAX-6  59) SIGRTMAX-5  60) SIGRTMAX-4  61) SIGRTMAX-3  62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1  64) SIGRTMAX

one can notice that the integer value of SIGRTMIN is 34, and not 32.

... 31) SIGSYS 34) SIGRTMIN ...

Why?

$ uname -r
4.19.0-8-amd64

$ ls -l /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.28.so 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.8M May  1  2019 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.28.so*
Paulo Tomé
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  • [Why does `kill -l` not list signal numbers of 32 and 33?](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/155829/why-does-kill-l-not-list-signal-numbers-of-32-and-33) has a similar answer. – Orçun Çolak Mar 16 '20 at 05:01

1 Answers1

9

The answer to this question can be found in signal(7) man page, in Real-time Signals section

Real-time Signals

Linux supports real-time signals as originally defined in the POSIX.1b real-time extensions (and now included in POSIX.1-2001). The range of supported real-time signals is defined by the macros SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX. POSIX.1-2001 requires that an implementation support at least POSIX_RTSIG_MAX(8) real-time signals.

The Linux kernel supports a range of 32 different real-time signals, numbered 33 to 64. However, the glibc POSIX threads implementation internally uses two (for NPTL) or three (for LinuxThreads) real-time signals (see pthreads(7)), and adjusts the value of SIGRTMIN suitably (to 34 or 35).

Paulo Tomé
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