The rationale was discussed in-depth earlier on LWN (https://lwn.net/Articles/982186/ https://lwn.net/Articles/982186/). Signals are useful as a software analo

The rationale was discussed in-depth earlier on LWN (https://lwn.net/Articles/982186/ https://lwn.net/Articles/982186/). Signals are useful as a software analogue to hardware interrupts, even though they are probably too low-level for most application use cases. They are for example used by the Golang runtime to preempt threads AFAIU, which wouldn't otherwise be possible non-cooperatively. Intel even included an ISA extension called user-IPIs, which is similar to signals.