Announcing Fedora 11 Alpha (blink)

[Adam Jackson]

On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 11:21 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 21:08 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Adam Jackson wrote:
> > > If someone can come up with a scenario where you really need zap, and
> > > not just vt switch and/or logout dialog, I'm eager to hear it.  If you
> > > can come up with one that isn't "some broken application took a server
> > > grab and won't give it back", I'll even be interested.
> > 
> > Well since you asked, I use it simply as a faster way to logout. If my 
> > system is already maxed out, waiting for a confirmation dialog to pop 
> > out is frustrating at times.
> 
> Same here, except I sometimes have a nagging worry about whether
> everything is going to be properly cleaned up. I mean, is it actually
> specified somewhere that Ctrl-Alt-Bspace is *exactly* the same as doing
> a desktop logout?

The zap behaviour of c-a-bs just raises a dispatch exception inside the
server.  We won't actually exit until the end of processing of the
current request, which means if you're stuck in the middle of some
insanely expensive rendering operation, you still have to wait for it to
finish before the server will go down.  And, of course, it might never
finish, for example if the GPU's command processor is wedged.

If the app does different things for "socket close" versus "polite
request from the session leader to exit" then c-a-bs isn't the same as
logout.  Any such app is arguably already broken, of course.  But the
upshot is that server zap really is a mean thing to do.

If, however, the thing that's burning all your CPU is merely some X app
and not the X server, then c-a-bs is just a faster method of getting to
something like the Force Quit dialog on a mac, except you kill
everything.  Seems like you'd rather have Force Quit to me.

(What would be _really_ cool is some extra data on top of the Force Quit
dialog that showed you things like which process is taking all your CPU
and disk utilization.  Disk in particular, since swap is far more doom
than CPU.)

- ajax
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