Re: Crashing X/Gnome with Gimp... [E]xit, [H]alt, show[S]tacktrace or [P]roceed

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Bhola N. De wrote:
> Tod Liebeck wrote:
> > 
> > IMHO, on a desktop machine, an X crash is equivalent to a Windows95
> > total/complete system crash, and no application should ever be allowed
> > to cause something like this.
> 
> Wanted to voice my recent experience on this.  My computer completely
> froze, twice in two consecutive days under, GNOME.  It locked keyboard
> and mouse.  Ctrl-Alt-Backspace did not work for exiting out of the
> X-windows to the console.  Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-Alt-F2, etc. did not take
> it to the console either.  I waited for a few minutes for it to recover
> that it never did.  I had to use the hardware reset button to reboot the
> computer.
> 

As Jim Gettys is so fond of pointing out: this is *always* a bug in the X
server. It is *not* a bug in Gnome. If the X server crashes, it's an X
server bug. There is nothing an application can do that is supposed to
crash the X sever.

The situation is exactly analagous to the kernel: if Linux crashes, it is
*always* a bug in the Linux kernel, because apps/users are not supposed to
be able to bring down the machine. Similarly, X apps are not supposed to
be able to bring down X. If Apache crashed your Linux box, you'd report
the problem to Linus, not the Apache people.

If you can figure out how Gnome breaks a particular server, we can put in
a workaround; but it should be absolutely clear that Gnome is not the
cause of the problem. You need to file a bug report with your X server
vendor (probably XFree86, in the RH 6.0 case).

The #1 reason to do this is that none of us have the faintest clue how to
debug an X server. :-) X is a truly huge and complicated piece of
software; it would take weeks to get even the most superficial
understanding of it. The X guys on the other hand will already be familiar
with the code.

Havoc