Re: Plans for X

[Steve Bowman <sbowman@frostwork.net>]

I had some problems with X 3.3.6 on cvs hurd last night I was going
to report, then your message arrived so I'll combine that report with
my response....

On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 12:53:39AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 08:54:18PM -0700, Steve Bowman wrote:
> > planning to rework your patches for 4.x,
> 
> Ok, I looked into it, and it doesn't seem to hard. There are all old issues,
> so the 3.3.6 patch is very applicable (unfortunately nobody took the time to
> find out, and simply rejected it outright), but there are a couple of new
> issues.
> 
> The current[1] status is: Everything compiles, except xload, but that's easy to
> make work (I have a similar patch for exim somewhere). But the resulting
> binary doesn't run properly: There are some socket problems (starting twice
> won't work, you have to reboot. X believes another server is running), and
> the keyboard handling doesn't work (it gets interrupted system call).

Hmmm.  I just tried to run 3.3.6 last night on hurd built from cvs[1].
The system completely hangs - at least it appears to at the console.
I was able to telnet in from elsewhere to see if I could get any useful
information.  X was already down (i.e., no X-related processes running), I
tried to restart X remotely and it thought another server was running and
IIRC there were some ioctl errors (keyboard maybe, I'd have to check again
to be sure).  Tried cleaning up /tmp, same thing.  On another attempt,
I tried cleaning with "settrans -fgap /tmp/.X11-unix/X0" in addition to
renaming .X11-unix, no help there either (ifsock was the old translator).
It may be that the display or keyboard just need resetting to get the
console back, but I haven't figured out how to do that and had to reboot.
Is there a way to reset the display and keyboard after X has crashed
without rebooting?

This sounds suspiciously similar to the problems you've had with X 4.x.
I'm wondering if there's something going on with the hurd that X is
triggering.  What's changed since the 20000921 hurd except the tunnel
changes?  Or should I be cross-compiling hurd instead of trying to
build natively?

I haven't tried restoring the old hurd yet to verify that X works again,
but I actually did the same thing last weekend and restoring the old
(0921) hurd cured X.  I didn't report it yet because I wanted to rebuild
and reinstall hurd to make sure the problem wasn't there.  AFAICT,
it's a clean build except as noted in [1].

> 
> Anyway, as I said, those are attackable. Especially as I got it to compile.
> 
> I will follow up with real patches. If somebody has the guts to help out, I
> can make preliminary patches available soon, but only if you really want to
> debug things. Otherwise just wait for the packages to become available and
> stick with XFree 3.3.6 for now.

I'm game to work on it[2], in fact, I was going to ask for your 3.3.6
patches to see what kind of things I should look for and where to look
in 4.x to patch.  Although my comments to Branden were in reference to
some other boxen I have with an NV1 chipset (and therefore not supported
by 4.x), my hurd box has a Diamond Viper V770 card (TNT2 chipset) that
should work with 4.x.  I've looked at the 3.3 source but I haven't looked
at the 4.x source yet nor have I fooled with Branden's 4.x packages so
4.x is new territory for me even if X is not.

Steve

[1] I had a slight problem building hurd.  I was building it natively as
"dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us" and hurd crashed in the middle (no, I didn't
catch it in time to collect any crash data).  I continued the build with
"dpkg-buildpackage -nc -uc -us" which resumed building the expected debs,
source, and changes files and installed the debs with --force-conflicts
due to shellutils (IIRC) conflict.  And I rebooted before continuing.

[2] To the extent that time permits which is unfortunately very limited
for the next few months.

-- 
Steve Bowman  <sbowman@frostwork.net> (preferred)
Buckeye, AZ   <sbowman@goodnet.com> <bowmanc@acm.org>
              <http://www.goodnet.com/~sbowman/>

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