Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] progress: replace setitimer() with alarm()

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:33:04 -0700

Johannes Sixt <[email-masked]> writes:

> We use SIGALRM to raise a flag that tells the progress code to act in
> some way. The progress code does not act asynchronously, but only when
> there is an opportunity to look at the flag, i.e., it acts synchronously
> in response to a third party (SIGALRM) that told it that it's time to
> act.
>
> But we can change the progress code to do the time keeping itself.
> Instead of looking whether a flag was raised, we can let it look at the
> wall clock and check whether an interval has elapsed.

Yes, the use of itimer to only change the flag without doing
anything funky has been a very safe way to use signals, doing only
absolutely minimal thing in the signal handler.  Having to rearm the
signal in the signal handler in Carlo's patch made me feel dirtier.

But looking at the wallclock once every iteration of a busy loop?  

Operating system folks may have worked hard to minimize the cost of
system calls to gettimeofday() in order to help applications that do
so, but I somehow feel even dirtier to hear proposal to do so to
replace a signal that we set and forget, to be reminded once every
second.

I dunno.