Making stable kernels more stable

Posted Oct 31, 2018 16:16 UTC (Wed) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Making stable kernels more stable by dgm
Parent article: Making stable kernels more stable

Are desktop environments prepared to cope with losing the grahics context?

X applications certainly know how to redraw a window when you uniconize it. twm has a "restart" action that redraws all windows (with uniconizing and reiconizing if necessary). I use this when my Intel-based X-Terminal decides to make everything black.

My experience concerning Intel and AMD is that I have graphics problems on Intel (HD Graphics 520/500 on Skylake and Apollo Lake), while AMD (Juniper XT) works flawlessly. This may have to do with the age of the hardware (Juniper XT is from 2009, HD 5xx from 2015), but my experience is certainly the opposite of what others have stated.

Making stable kernels more stable

Posted Oct 31, 2018 17:29 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

Losing the graphics context is not like unmapping a window. When a window is unmapped you still have all the resources (e.g. pixmaps) which were previously registered with the server. For that matter the window itself still exists and things like OpenGL contexts which were generated from it remain intact; all you need to do when the window is uniconified is redraw.

Losing the graphics context is more like losing the connection to the X server. Most applications aren't prepared to deal with that gracefully. There is also the extra complication that the context includes *hardware* resources which are no longer available, and which may have been mapped directly into the application's address space. The backing for XShm mappings doesn't suddenly cease to exist even if you do lose your connection to the server.