[Haskell-cafe] Foreign calls and periodic alarm signals

[Phil Ruffwind]

TL;DR: Does 'foreign import safe' silence the periodic alarm signals?

I received a report on this rather strange bug in 'directory':

https://github.com/haskell/directory/issues/35#issuecomment-136890912

I've concluded based on the dtruss log that it's caused by the timer
signal that the GHC runtime emits.  Somewhere inside the guts of
'realpath' on Mac OS X, there is a function that does the moral
equivalent of:

    while (statfs64(…) && errno == EINTR);

On a slow filesystem like SSHFS, this can cause a permanent hang from
the barrage of signals.

The reporter found that using 'foreign import safe' mitigates the
issue.  What I'm curious mainly is that: is something that the GHC
runtime guarantees -- is using 'foreign import safe' assured to turn
off the periodic signals for that thread?

I tried reading this article [1], which seems to be the only
documentation I could find about this, and it didn't really go into
much depth about them.  (I also couldn't find any info about how
frequently they occur, on which threads they occur, or which specific
signal it uses.)

I'm also concerned whether there are other foreign functions out in
the wild that could suffer the same bug, but remain hidden because
they normally complete before the next alarm signal.

[1]: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Rts/Signals