This lets the threaded RTS use SIGVTALRM rather than SIGALRM for its
interval timer signal, so the threaded and non-threaded RTS are
compatible.  It unfortunately doesn't completely fix #850/#1156, for
that we really have to use a restartable sleep instead of usleep().

Also I cleaned up the timer API a little: instead of returning an
error value that ultimately gets ignored, we now report errors from
system calls and exit.