XOrg freeze that affects a lot of people

[Michel Dänzer]

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 19:45 +0000, Charles Goodwin wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 13:27 -0500, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> 
> > 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.  

Read Anton Markov's post again.

> In fact, somebody else has said they could Alt-SysRq and reboot.  Also 
> things can be recovered via ssh.  (Does that count? Perhaps not?)  

While that may work in some cases, in my experience it more often does
not. YMMV.

> 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.

And then do what? Even in the cases where recovery may be possible, the
only entity that would know how to recover is... the driver. And if it
knows how to do it, there's nothing that prevents it from detecting a
lockup and recovering from it right now.


> > 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?

I guess so, but still not necessarily realistic.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer      |     Debian (powerpc), X and DRI developer
Libre software enthusiast    |   http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer