Futex wait is not interrupted by signals if no timeout is provided

From: Elijah Stone
Date: Fri Aug 12 2022 - 21:27:15 EST


I've observed a strange behaviour of futexes that I believe to be a bug. If a signal is delivered while a futex wait is in progress, the wait will be interrupted, but only if that wait had a timeout. I expect it to be interrupted regardless of whether a timeout is provided. The following runnable snippet demonstrates this:

void handler(int) { printf("SIGINT\n"); }
int main() {
signal(SIGINT,handler);
int i=2;
printf("1\n");
syscall(SYS_futex, &i, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, &(struct timespec){.tv_sec=1000});
printf("2\n");
syscall(SYS_futex, &i, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL);
printf("3\n");
}

Pressing ^C once causes the first wait to terminate, and '2' to be printed. But repeatedly pressing it after that does not allow the program to make progress.