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To: John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu>
In-reply-to: Your message of Fri, 22 Oct 2004 10:27:59 -0700.
             <20041022172759.GX22681@funkthat.com> 
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:01:30 -0700
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From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com>
cc: freebsd-net@freebsd.org
cc: Andre Oppermann <andre@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: aio_connect ? 
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In message <20041022172759.GX22681@funkthat.com>, you wrote:

>Oh, another thing is that there isn't yet a verbose signal delivery
>mechanism..  There are only two signals that are for user's use...
                                        ^defined in relevant standards

Signal numbers are typically represented as ints.  Is there anything in
the kernel that prevents me from, say, calling kill(2) with a second
argument of, say, 0xdeadbeef, in other words any old random int value
that I might care to use?

If not, then there are effectively 4 billion+ different signal numbers
that could be used by a programmer.  Such usage might not be fully
standard-conformant, but it might work OK, nontheless.  (In fact, one
might even be able to use _most_ typical pointer values as if they
were signal numbers, simply by casting them to ints before use.)