consolekit thread explosion ...

[Kay Sievers]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 23:04, William Jon McCann<mccann at jhu.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 10:55 AM, Michael Meeks
> <michael.meeks at novell.com> wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>>        Kay mentioned you might be interested in this :-)
>>
>>        Having logged into & out of my (opensuse factory) desktop for a while -
>> I run 'pstree -p' and I'm always amazed at how much thread-space
>> consolekit takes up in that view.
>>
>> $ pstree -p | grep console-kit | wc -l
>> 62
>>
>>        Do we really need 62 threads they all appear quiescent; and
>> interestingly lsof shows:
> ...
>>        over and over again: is that deliberate ? one file handle per thread ?
>> I guess I don't know what that is doing; presumably it's a known issue
>> (?) - if not, should I file it as a bug ? I have:
>
> That is deliberate.  The way it works, for now, is each of those
> threads are blocking in VT_WAITACTIVE.  Last I checked, the signals
> from VT_GETSTATE are only delivered to one process, in most cases:
> Xorg.  And signals are yuck anyway.
>
> So, looking forward, two possible paths are: fix the VT subsystem,
> don't use the VT subsystem.  Maybe the later is a more viable option
> these days...

I like old mails. :)

Lennart and I looked into this a few days ago, and it seems there is a
pretty trivial fix to the kernel possible, to live with only one
thread in CK.

Or maybe we just limit the VCs to 4 or 8 instead of 64, which should
cover more than needed, right?

Thanks,
Kay