this bug was introduced in a recent patch. the problem we're working
around is that broken GNU software wants to use "struct siginfo"
rather than "siginfo_t", but "siginfo" is not in the reserved
namespace and thus not legal for the standard header to use.
this implementation is superior to the glibc/nptl implementation, in
that it gives true realtime behavior. there is no risk of timer
expiration events being lost due to failed thread creation or failed
malloc, because the thread is created as time creation time, and
reused until the timer is deleted.