[cryptonector]

Spawning a new thread to handle a signal is much better than preemption: you then have no concerns about async-signal-safety that aren't plain old thread-safety concerns. I'd much rather have thread-safety constraints than async-signal-safety constraints.

[quotemstr]

Sort of. At least you can mask signals. I agree that threads are probably better overall, but I don't think it's a huge difference.

[Vogtinator]

Linux can do that as well, see SIGEV_THREAD.

[quotemstr]

Only for AIO, which few use.

[andreyv]

You can spawn a thread manually and use the POSIX sigwait() function.

[quotemstr]

That won't stop the process-wide registered signal handler working and it won't do anything about being able to reliably handle synchronous signals.