Reconnectable X - improve desktop reliability

[Matthew Woehlke]

Chris Tyler wrote:
> (2) "Zillions of real people" have random X server crashes where the
> rest of the system stays up and their applications keep running?

It's happened to me, not often, but it happens. Then there are the cases 
where X goes off the deep end (I had to kill it once after its footprint 
had ballooned to over 7 GB(!)) or otherwise needs to be restarted.

Heck, just to be able to upgrade X without logging out would be useful.

> Huh. I
> manage dozens of machines with a wide range of different X
> configurations -- some of them really unusual -- and I don't experience
> that. And I work on a campus with hundreds of Linux systems and it
> doesn't happen there either. I must be really lucky.

...or you don't use any nvidia cards, or else people with nvidia cards 
don't care about Shininess.

I have two boxes with nvidia, only one of them has working GL. (This one 
has three heads, and two cards that only ever worked together "nicely" 
once, circa F8. These days I consider myself lucky to have X working 
across them at all, and GL hasn't worked in ages.)

> Frankly, in my context, reroutable would be far more useful than
> reconnectable. But see (1).

Xrandr should already allow you to bring up a second display (which 
could be anything; crt, lcd, projector) and move windows over to it. Or 
there is X-over-TCP.

So either X already does what you want, or what you are asking for is 
the ability to change in real time what X server an app is using... 
which is 90% the same* as "reconnectable". Therefore, I don't understand 
the objection.

(* "Reconnectable" needs that apps don't go piff along with their X 
server. "Reroutable" (option 3) needs to change the server proactively, 
rather than just reactively. Both need the ability for apps to change X 
server.)

-- 
Matthew
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