I’m working on an embedded Linux system which allows to chose the root filesystem to boot from (flash card or NAND flash) early in the boot process. Now I was trying to get ppp (for a GSM/GPRS connection) working. But the chat-script hangs forever, it does not get a timeout. Turns out, chat uses alarm(2) to wait for a timeout. After quite some time of debugging I found out that SIGALRM is blocked (look for SigBlk in /proc/pid/status, this is the mask of blocked signals for process with pid).

After some googling I came across a blog entry (look for September 5, 2011) that describes a bug in bash: Bash, when calling “read” with a timeout, will install a signal handler for SIGALRM and longjump out of the signal handler, leaving SIGALRM blocked forever.

The boot-script runs as init (with pid 1) and therefore will leave SIGALRM blocked for all children. My immediate workaround is to read the filesystem to boot in a sub-shell…seems the bug is fixed with newer versions of bash.