[Xprint] Xserver large file aware?

[Roland Mainz]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
[snip]
> > Therefore my question -
> > is the Xserver code supposed to be large file aware?
> 
> I don't think anyone's done any work in that area, since the X server
> doesn't normally access files that have any need of being that large.
> (A 2gb config file would be truly frightening.)

A 2GB config file will hopefully something we will never see... =:-)
... but there are things like |mmap()| of device spaces or kernel/PCI
space which may hit that issue (or output files such as spooler or log
files (which may harm longrunning Xservers)).
But again we are hitting a problem here: Recompiling the Xserver code
with largefile support enabled will likely break the module ABI as there
are AFAIK some 32bit-only I/O libc functions emulated by the ELF loader
- and the datatypes for offsets are AFAIK 32bit and not 64bit (yes, it
would be possible to add |*64()| versions of the 32bit functions to the
libc emulation in the ELF loader but that does not cure the general
problem (and ignores the existance of the dlloader completely)). The
Solaris lfcompile(5) manual page lists another bunch of additional
scenarios which need to be taken care of but I am not sure whether this
work will ever happen (see below).

The only ad-hoc solution here may be to recompile the Xserver as 64bit
application and add the issue that "the Xserver core is not largefile
aware" to the wishlist of things which should be fixed if the module ABI
gets reworked (which will likely not happen until h*ll freezes... ;-().

----

Bye,
Roland

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