How to disable/limit pixmap cache in X

[Michel Dänzer]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 17:08 +0100, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> 
> > A pixmap is an image which is stored by the server. If a client tells the
> > server to create a pixmap, failure to do so is likely to be considered a
> > "fatal" error by the client. Once the server has created a pixmap, it is
> > required to store it until the client explicitly tells the server to free
> > it.
> 
> I'm not an expert in X, so please excuse (and feel free to correct) me if I
> have read this situation wrong.  In the same sense as a web client should
> never be able to crash a web server, surely an X client should not be able
> to crash an X server?  I would have thought for the sake of the X server
> and its user, it should be able to prevent a client from using arbitrary
> amounts of memory.  Perhaps this is my idealistic or even wrong point of
> view?

The X server crashing on out of memory is most definitely a bug.
However, artificially limiting the amount of resources that any given
client may allocate would again seem like a workaround instead of a fix
for the actual problem.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |          http://tungstengraphics.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer