[PATCH-V4] xserver: Optional backtrace handler

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Oct 12, 2011, at 6:12 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> On 10/12/11 10:50 AM, Keith Packard wrote:
>>  2. I'd love to figure out how to fork at the time of the error; this
>>     would encourage people to actually use this option regularly.
>> 
>>     posix threads makes the usual libc fork() function take the malloc
>>     mutex across its operations, but I wonder if syscall(SYS_fork) is
>>     portable enough to be used instead?
> 
> As discussed on IRC, no, syscall() is not portable, but the libc fork() issue
> seems to be a linux problem, as SUSv2/Unix98 documents fork() as safe to use
> in a signal handler, but glibc does not.   posix_spawn() may also be a more
> portable option.
> 
> The existing Solaris xorg_backtrace_pstack() in Xorg's os/backtrace.c has
> been forking in the signal handler for a couple years now - ideally we'd
> be able to mostly share the code across platforms, but I've not looked into
> that.

If fork(2) in glibc isn't signal handler safe, are you sure posix_spawn(3) is in glibc?