Re: Dumb question: Why are exceptions such as SIGSEGV not logged

[Mike Fedyk <mfedyk@matchmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 03:39:15PM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
> 
> > And why not just catch the ones sent from the kernel?  That's the one that
> > is killing the program because it crashed, and that's the one the
> > origional
> > poster wants logged...
> 
> 	Because sometimes a program wants to terminate. And it is perfectly legal
> for a programmer who needs to terminate his program as quickly as possible
> to do this:
> 
> char *j=NULL;
> signal(SIGSEGV, SIG_DFL);
> *j++;
> 
> 	This is a perfectly sensible thing for a program to do with well-defined
> semantics. If a program wants to create a child every minute like this and
> kill it, that's perfectly fine. We should be able to do that in the default
> configuration without a sysadmin complaining that we're DoSing his syslogs.

Are you saying that a signal requested from userspace uses the same code
path as the signal sent when a process has overstepped its bounds?

Surely some flag can be set so that we know the kernel is killing it because
it did something illegal...