We need clients that can survive an X restart.
Posted Jan 19, 2007 18:43 UTC (Fri) by
AJWM (guest, #15888)
In reply to:
LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems by drag
Parent article:
LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems
> when the drivers in Linux bork, X restarts.
The problem is, that pretty much takes all the X clients with it, so you've lost your whole session anyway.
Now, arguably that's the fault of the client(s) rather than the X server, but I've yet to see an X client program written that could gracefully recover (ie to the point of picking up exactly where it left off) if its X display was yanked out from under it and restarted. It's been long enough since I programmed at the Xlib level that I don't recall how much state (of windows, etc) is in the server vs the client (via the X libraries), but I imagine that enough state _could_ be kept in the client (again, courtesy of the xlib) to redisplay to the new X server everything that was there when the old one borked.
It'd be an interesting and non-trivial programming exercise, but a massively useful one. (Nothing worse than having numerous windows open, having your X display lock up, and knowing that the only thing you can do is blow it all away even though the client programs are still perfectly OK - or will be until their display connection is killed.)
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