Comment by geofft

Does running the self-pipe trick on a separate thread solve that issue? It seems like it's basically equivalent to signalfd (neither worse nor better, unless you're worried about platform-specific thread bugs): you end up with a signal mask on your main thread, but you also avoid EINTR on your main thread. Any possible pipe lockup just happens on the signal-handling thread, so the mainloop can keep running and eventually dequeue signals.