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

[Christopher Blizzard]

Jim Gettys wrote:

>Roland,
>
>While I don't doubt there could be problems, you should
>be aware in the past that Mozilla's threading itself was badly
>broken (IIRC, at the time wasn't even actually calling Xlib's thread
>initialization at all; this was in late Netscape days).  I
>remember a very frustrating debugging session on the
>phone with Keithp where we ended up having to conclude we
>couldn't fix it (it being Netscape, without source available),
>and that the fault was 100% Netscape's.
>  
>
Mozilla only does drawing from the main thread, so it's not like we're 
even pushing that code very hard.  Mozilla's threading doesn't have any 
serious issues that I know of right now.  I don't know what roland is 
seeing.  So, no, I don't know of any X threading issues.

--Chris

>So before going down this (potential) rat-hole, what makes
>you believe that the tests themselves are not buggy?  Chasing
>threading bugs through mozilla isn't something we'd like
>to do, given its size.
>
>Chris, do you know of any outstanding X threading
>problems?  If you do, can you give us a clue as to what is
>going on?
>                              - Jim
>
>On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 19:56, Roland Mainz wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi!
>>
>>----
>>
>>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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Christopher Blizzard
http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/
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