[PATCH-V4] xserver: Optional backtrace handler

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 13 October 2011 17:53, Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:49:42 +0100, Simon Farnsworth <simon.farnsworth at onelan.co.uk> wrote:
>> A question - what is it about preforking a backtrace handler that you think
>> will put people off using it?
>
> It's an ugly hack to work around a bug in glibc. A non-prefork version
> wouldn't consume any resources until the server actually crashes.
>
> If we knew that systems which did not have syscall(2) also had a working
> fork(2), then we could simply use syscall(SYS_fork) where available and
> expect that to work around any potential glibc bugs.

Or, just accept that once you've not only segfaulted but are
attempting to carry on and deal with the crash post-mortem, with the
server in god-knows-what state, it's always going to be best-effort
and you might not always be able to do everything you'd ever wanted.
*shrug*

Cheers,
Daniel