allynh@marvax.berkeley.edu (Allyn Hardyck) (02/23/89)
Rather than saying "It crashes, what can I do?" I have attempted to come up with some possible reasons. I would greatly appreciate it if someone would say if any of these are likely or if the problem lies elsewhere. Constants: a GPX running Ultrix 2.3, R3, the crashes (hangs, more accurately, as there is no vmcore dump) always occurring on logout. One hang occurred, with no one else on the machine, but after an xphoon that had been running had been killed. Is it possible that some monochrome routines put the machine in a state that makes xterms fail to start up? (It has baffled me for a while why monochrome images should take so much longer to start up than color images.) Another hang took place in the midst of attempting to kill the server and all associated xdm's. Apparently one xdm restarted itself in time, but hung instead of printing the login window. Is there some sane way of stopping X dead deliberately? It seems that the X server will start up any necessary xdm's it needs, and vice versa, even occasionally when sent signal 9. So perhaps there is a problem with the server's or xdm's handling of signals? I've also thought that the server may assume total priority on startup. There are several other terminals attached to the system, running compiles virtually all day. If, at the end of one X session, a compile commandeers CPU time, is there some part of X that breaks? Any replies, flames would probably be helpful, as we're dying at least once a day here, necessitating total restart. Thanks. Allyn Hardyck allynh@marvax.berkeley.edu