Testing whether Xlib threading support works in XORG-RELEASE-1 branch...

[Roland Mainz]

Hi!

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Recently I added some code to the Mozilla codebase (see
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235188) to test whether the
threading support in Xlib is useable or not. After the code landed I did
some tests with the older Xorg/Xfree86 releases... with devastating
results - _NONE_ of the tested platforms (Linux, AIX, Solaris) was able
to run Mozilla with threading support enabled. All builds hung with a
deadlock, usually somewhere in X extension libraries.

Therefore it would be nice to test whether Xlib and the X11 extension
libraries and file bugs on demand if there are any problems left
(Xfree86 people did some work on that recently... but I am not sure
whether the fixes are "complete" to run such a complex application like
Mozilla).

Testing the thread support with Mozilla can be done like this:
1. Download a Mozilla build (>= release 1.7b, see
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/)
% wget
'http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.7b/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.7b.tar.gz'

2. Unpack it:
% gunzip -c mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.7b.tar.gz | tar -xf -

3. Set the MOZILLA_X11_XINITTHREADS env variabe to "1":
% export MOZILLA_X11_XINITTHREADS=1

4. Run Mozilla
% ./mozilla/mozilla

Current result:
Mozilla hangs at startup

Expected result:
Mozilla should run without problems, incl. the Macromedia Flash plugin
and printing via Xprint (see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xprint/ and
http://xprint.mozdev.org).

----

Bye,
Roland

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