backfire(4)

backfire4

Send a signal from driver to user

Overview

The backfire driver reads a numerical string that is sent to the /dev/backfire device and sends the corresponding signal to the calling user program. Reading from /dev/backfire returns the time of the day when the most recent sent request was serviced or 0, if a sent request was not yet received. The time of the day is displayed in seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC followed by the fraction of the second in microseconds separated by a comma.

Purpose

The backfire driver is normally used in combination with the program sendme to benchmark the performance of the kernel's signal sending capabilities.

Examples

head -1 /dev/backfire 0,0 trap "echo Got signal 7" 7 echo 7 >/dev/backfire Got signal 7 head -1 /dev/backfire 1234567890,123456

Releases

Unchanged in 4 releases since Debian 6.0 (Squeeze).

  1. 6.0–9

Authors

Carsten Emde <[email protected]>

From rt-tests 1.0-1+b1 in Debian 9 (Stretch). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.