Troubleshooting Containers

Linux Containers

PID 1

Signals

Linux containers often run the main application as PID 1. However, PID 1 has special treatment related to sending kill signals:

The only signals that can be sent to process ID 1, the init process, are those for which init has explicitly installed signal handlers. This is done to assure the system is not brought down accidentally.

You may display the signals the process has installed handlers for, blocked, or ignored (SigCgt, SigBlk, and SigIgn, respectively, in hexadecimal):

The /proc/pid/task/tid/status file contains various fields that show the signals that a thread is blocking (SigBlk), catching (SigCgt), or ignoring (SigIgn). (The set of signals that are caught or ignored will be the same across all threads in a process.) Other fields show the set of pending signals that are directed to the thread (SigPnd) as well as the set of pending signals that are directed to the process as a whole (ShdPnd). The corresponding fields in /proc/pid/status show the information for the main thread.

Therefore, print these masks for PID 1:

$ grep -e Sig /proc/1/status
SigQ:   0/39372
SigPnd: 0000000000000000
SigBlk: 0000000000000000
SigIgn: 0000000000001000
SigCgt: 2000000181004cff

Then cross-reference the bit mask (hexadecimal) with signal numbers (decimal):

$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP        2) SIGINT        3) SIGQUIT       4) SIGILL        5) SIGTRAP
 6) SIGABRT       7) SIGBUS        8) SIGFPE        9) SIGKILL      10) SIGUSR1
11) SIGSEGV      12) SIGUSR2      13) SIGPIPE      14) SIGALRM      15) SIGTERM
16) SIGSTKFLT    17) SIGCHLD      18) SIGCONT      19) SIGSTOP      20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN      22) SIGTTOU      23) SIGURG       24) SIGXCPU      25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM    27) SIGPROF      28) SIGWINCH     29) SIGIO        30) SIGPWR
31) SIGSYS       34) SIGRTMIN     35) SIGRTMIN+1   36) SIGRTMIN+2   37) SIGRTMIN+3
38) SIGRTMIN+4   39) SIGRTMIN+5   40) SIGRTMIN+6   41) SIGRTMIN+7   42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9   44) SIGRTMIN+10  45) SIGRTMIN+11  46) SIGRTMIN+12  47) SIGRTMIN+13
48) SIGRTMIN+14  49) SIGRTMIN+15  50) SIGRTMAX-14  51) SIGRTMAX-13  52) SIGRTMAX-12
53) SIGRTMAX-11  54) SIGRTMAX-10  55) SIGRTMAX-9   56) SIGRTMAX-8   57) SIGRTMAX-7
58) SIGRTMAX-6   59) SIGRTMAX-5   60) SIGRTMAX-4   61) SIGRTMAX-3   62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1   64) SIGRTMAX 

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