Synchronous Signals

Traps (such as SIGILL, SIGFPE, SIGSEGV) result from something a thread does to itself, such as dividing by zero or making reference to nonexistent memory. 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 synchronously-generated signals—the handler is invoked on the thread that generated the synchronous signal.

However, if the process has not chosen to deal with such problems by establishing an appropriate signal handler, then the default action will be taken when a trap occurs, even if the offending thread has the generated signal blocked. The default action for such signals is to terminate the process, perhaps with a core dump.

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.