Synchronous Signals

Traps (such as SIGILL, SIGFPE, SIGSEGV) result from something a thread does to itself, such as dividing by zero or explicitly sending itself a signal. A trap is handled only by the thread that caused it. Several threads in a process can generate and handle the same type of trap simultaneously.

Extending the idea of signals to individual threads is easy for synchronous signals--the signal is dealt with by the thread that caused the problem.

However, if the thread has not chosen to deal with the problem, such as by establishing a signal handler with sigaction(2), the handler is invoked on the thread that receives the synchronous signal.

Because such a synchronous signal usually means that something is seriously wrong with the whole process, and not just with a thread, terminating the process is often a good choice.