Wayland crash scenario

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:08:51PM +0100, Mohamed Ikbel Boulabiar wrote:
> I was wondering whether we can find a better solution to the scenarios
> where Wayland crashes.
> You all know that for the X case, when it crashes, everything open is
> lost, you need to re-login and you need to reopen your apps again.
> Non-saved work will be lost.

In my experience triaging X bugs reported against Ubuntu, these days it
is relatively uncommon for the _X server_ itself to crash.  Rather, most
faults are in the kernel drm code via a GPU hang or similar, and those
generally always require a reboot to reset.  Improved diagnostic tools
would be a big help here.

I would imagine, especially given Wayland's much smaller codebase size,
that Wayland crashes (i.e. userspace segfaults) are going to be even
more rare.  I assume GPU hangs will be just as catastrophic with Wayland
as with X since they occur in kernel code, and are going to be no easier
to work around.  Perhaps if there was a reliable way to reset the gpu...

So, being able to restart wayland without closing apps would be a nifty
feature, but I would suspect it would not get much utilization in
practice.

Bryce