a very small interval and ignore the signal. This might lead to a softirq starvation when the interval is so small that the timer is requeued onto the softirq pending list right away. This problem was pointed out by Jan Kiszka. Thanks Jan ! The correct solution would be to stop the timer, when the signal is ignored and rearm it when SIG_IGN is removed. Unfortunately this requires modification in sigaction and involves non trivial sighand locking. It's too late in the release cycle for such a change. For now we just keep the timer running and enforce that the timer only fires every jiffie. This does not break anything as we keep the overrun counter correct. It adds a little inaccuracy to the timer_gettime() interface, but... The more complex change is necessary anyway to fix another short coming of the current implementation, which I discovered while looking at this problem: A pending signal is discarded when SIG_IGN is set. In case that a posixtimer signal is pending then it is discarded as well, but when SIG_IGN is removed later nothing rearms the timer. This is not new, it's that way since posix timers have been merged. So nothing to worry about right now. I have a working solution to fix all of this, but the impact is too large for both stable and 2.6.22. I'm going to send it out for review in the next days. This should go into 2.6.21.stable as well. Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner Acked-by: Ingo Molnar Cc: Jan Kiszka Cc: Ulrich Drepper Cc: Stable Team Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds