Signal Handling

Vftrace catches the following UNIX signals:

• SIGTERM
• SIGINT
• SIGABRT
• SIGFPE
• SIGQUIT
• SIGSEGV

If any of these signals is encountered, Vftrace finalizes its run. This includes the creation of logfiles, which will include a note about the signal which caused the termination. Vftrace then raises SIGTERM itself.

There is no guarantee that this feature works in all circumstances, because e.g. SIGTERM is often proceeded by SIGKILL. The SIGKILL signal cannot be caught. A notable example are Slurm timelimits. Here, when a job's timelimit is reached, it is first terminated softly by SIGTERM. After a certain amount of time, specified by the killWait parameter, SIGKILL is evoked. For large processes, this time might not be sufficient to finalize the stack collation, which can take up to several seconds to minutes. In that case, no logfile would be generated.