Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 28 Mar 1999 23:33:21 +0200 | From | Thomas Wouters <> | Subject | Re: total freeze with framebuffer + X |
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On Sun, Mar 28, 1999 at 01:43:48PM -0500, Arvind Sankar wrote: > On Sun, Mar 28, 1999 at 08:27:45PM +0200, Mikulas Patocka wrote: [[Dave Miller: [credit added]]] > > > This is wrong too. shutdown sends a SIGTERM or some other "light" > > > signal, which X receives and then shuts down cleanly. > > > > > > Anyone who says that shutting down your machine from within' X can be > > > expected to crash your machine, and that this is OK, is smoking crack. > > > That's %100 a bug in my book.
> Agree wholeheartedly. Also bringing me back to my original example: I don't > think running a second server is `stupid'. X servers were designed to allow > themselves to be run multiple times. If the framebuffer driver doesn't let > this happen, it's a bug in the framebuffer driver.
I _think_ i've run two X displays (two complete X servers, even. Two different users) under matroxfb once. I'm not entirely sure, i've only used the fb for a while, but i frequently use two or three X servers under just as many usernames, to make snapshots of homepages, using netscape, xwpick and a simple shell script.
> > And if X terminates slowly, SIGKILL goes in few seconds...
Ah, yes, but this the X server can help. Never ignore the TERM signal, and always instantly switch back to text mode _before_ starting the shutdown of the window manager and applications. Even if this keeps lockfiles on disk because of the SIGKILL, it's better than having no display in single user mode AND having stale lockfiles :-)
I assume, of course, that the specific X server can choose to switch to a text console, but i seem to recall a small userspace utility that did just that -- so the X server should be able to.
> > I found much more serious bug: xinit sometimes sends SIGKILL to xserver > > when terminating. If your machine is under heavy load (make -j zImage) and > > you correctly terminate windowmanager (not xserver), xinit kills xserver > > with -9 and console is dead.
> This is actually supposed to be a feature: it's to protect against the server > crashing and refusing to terminate, which will definitely leave your console > unusable.
If not killing the X server will leave your console unusable, sending it SIGKILL will hardly help. It would be a lot more helpful if it'd save the videocards' state and restore it in such a case. I understand it's not possible with all video cards though. Shame :P
-- Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>
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