Sorry if I gve the impression I was prpoposing something new. I was trying to explain, in concrete terms, to a someone who is "not an operating systems person"

Sorry if I gve the impression I was prpoposing something new. I was trying to explain, in concrete terms, to a someone who is "not an operating systems person" what existing OSes do. The self-pipe trick just shows that what most applications need is an event polling mechanism, not a preemptive callback. As for signalfd, I'd say that is exactly the kind of interface nemaar wants INSTEAD of traditional signals.