[gdm-list] Killing the killable

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Forwarding for Cesare Tirabassi <norsetto alice it> since his original email
didn't go through to the gdm-list for some reason.

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Hello all,

I've been discussing this subject with Brian Cameron and he suggested I
seek your wisdom.

During gdm shutdown we would like to (possibly gracefully) kill as many
processes associated to the Gnome session as possible (for the reasons
and some background info you can have a look at these bug reports
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152907 and
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419301 ).

Unfortunately, a quick look at the lists of all spawned processes during
a typical session make us think that the task is next to impossible as
there seems to be a somewhat illogical association of processes and
PGRPs, PIDs and PPIDs (see
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152907#c5 for an example).

We can't simply kill all processes associated with a user since the
user may be logged into multiple displays, or might have telnetted/rlogged into
the system as well as having a session running.

Is this behaviour expected, and if so would there be any other way to tell
what processes on a system are associated with a given session?

Many thanks in advance for your help and support,

ct