block signals during fork

there are several reasons for this. some of them are related to race
conditions that arise since fork is required to be async-signal-safe:
if fork or pthread_create is called from a signal handler after the
fork syscall has returned but before the subsequent userspace code has
finished, inconsistent state could result. also, there seem to be
kernel and/or strace bugs related to arrival of signals during fork,
at least on some versions, and simply blocking signals eliminates the
possibility of such bugs.