[ubuntu-x] State of X for quantal

[Chase Douglas]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 11:23 AM, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
> 3.  xorg-server
>
> It seems like we have a lot more Xserver crashes than usual.  However,
> I think this is because of the improvements RAOF made to the apport
> crash catching tool to catch crashes more reliably.
>
> A number of the crashes appear to occur while trying to write error
> messages to the screen or to log files.  Last cycle cnd discerned these
> issues were due to signal-unsafe logging and a few patches were stuck
> in, and one of our own suspected patches was removed; now either we need
> more work here, or our assesment needs reevaluated.  This is probably a
> hard problem but if it can be figured out it would solve a big pain
> point - we're getting dupe bugs of these crashes sent in daily.
>
> The next actions here are:  A) Evaluate all the stack traces for obvious
> causes - null pointer derefs, corrupt memory, etc.  B) For any bug
> reports that we know steps to reproduce, either reproduce ourselves
> locally or forward these upstream, or both.  C)  For bugs we lack steps
> to reproduce, push back to reporters to try and figure that out.
> D) Review discussions with cnd from last cycle (check ubuntu-x@ mail list
> archives), and identify further next steps.

To be honest, the stack corruption issue has always been a "potential"
issue. It's hard to say whether the issue was the real cause of bugs
or not, but it could be. I don't have any proof either way.

The current X server in quantal should tell us if a message has been
printed unsafely. It will say that the message printing call needs to
be converted to a safe version. The message printing should always
make it to the log, I think, so we will definitely know if an unsafe
log occurred.

Thus, if we see a bug and we do *not* see an unsafe log warning, then
the bug must be something else. Perhaps that will help narrow down the
possibilities.

-- Chase