XOrg freeze that affects a lot of people

[Charles Goodwin]

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 13:27 -0500, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> buggy drivers will always be able to kill the system beyond recovery.

Yes, undoubtedly in some scenarios, but not always.  In this scenario,
the system is still functioning (can ssh in, background processes still
running, X can be killed and restarted, Alt-SysRq rumoured to work - if
I'd known about it before I downgraded my nvidia-drivers, I would verify
this).

> In particular, as has been pointed out already in this thread, if
> Alt-SysRq doesn't work, there's no way for software to recover from 
> that.

And at no point in the thread has it been claimed that Alt-SysRq does
not work.  In fact, somebody else has said they could Alt-SysRq and
reboot.  Also things can be recovered via ssh.  (Does that count?
Perhaps not?)  Additionally, people have already suggested that the
situation could plausibly be recovered by some form of watchdog process
within XOrg which could be used to realise when a request made to a
driver has failed.

> Michel, 'this is off topic' nay-sayer

If the topic is redefined as 'how can XOrg survive or gracefully handle
a non-fatal driver bug' is it then on-topic?

- Charlie