[PATCH 0/3] xserver: Client ID tracking
Rami Ylimäki
rami.ylimaki at vincit.fi
Tue Aug 31 01:35:31 PDT 2010
On 08/30/2010 09:11 PM, Mark Kettenis wrote:
>> From: =?utf-8?q?Rami=20Ylim=C3=A4ki?=<rami.ylimaki at vincit.fi>
>> Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:29:30 +0300
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> These patches add a simple framework for determining client related
>> IDs such as PID and process name within X server. After these changes
>> have been reviewed and accepted, the XRes extension will be modified
>> to use the framework and provide client ID information for clients
>> with a new protocol request.
> How useful is this really, given that information from remote clients
> isn't available, or at least cannot be trusted?
We have used this kind of code repeatedly in X server to identify local
clients that are behaving badly either by allocating too much memory and
resources in the server or by executing deprecated requests. Maintaining
private code to do this simply doesn't make sense anymore. Having the
code in X server by default would speed up development and debugging
time for us and also ease our maintenance burden.
We want to make also it possible to identify local clients outside of X
server. That's why we need a new request to query the PID information
reliably. It should be possible to easily track down problems on a
release version of a distribution without having to recompile a debug
version of X server first. Ultimately we want to use cnee to identify
clients that are executing deprecated requests and xrestop to identify
clients allocating too much resources. Currently there is no reliable
way to do this.
You are right in that we mainly care about local clients, because in
practice on our system all clients will be local. But I think that
having a good way to identify local clients is still very important even
though we wouldn't be able to reliably identify remote clients. We don't
mind if information about clients can't be trusted in a rogue
environment, because the framework would be used mainly to improve the
overall system quality and as an development aid, not as a secure client
framework for finding out which clients are trusted.
-- Rami
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