[openbox] openbox started from .xinitrc partially deadlock if started htop.

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2017-01-01 21:57, Piotr Karbowski wrote:

> If I try to start htop (ncurses application) via gmrun, the parent of
> htop become openbox, the htop goes into T state and half of my system
> deadlocks. Deadbeef, Firefox and Thunderbird goes gray and does not
> respond/refresh. I can still use openbox, switch windows and spawn new
> processes.
> 
> It's not possible to kill neither htop nor openbox, but if I kill the
> 'sh /home/piotr/.xinitrc' which shares the process group with both
> openbox and htop then system recovers, everything spawned from it is
> killed, I can start it up again and things works.
> 
> If I start urxvt (terminal emulator) and then run gmrun there, run
> htop thru gmrun, then the htop displays itself on the terminal from
> where I started gmrun from. This confusess me greatly.
> 
> Can someone help me understand what is going on here and where the
> problem is, actually? A ncurses application that try to overtake the
> terminal of parent, or openbox not handling such bizzare usecase?
> Running ncurses application outside of terminal emulator should fail
> anyway, but not in such way.

I don't have a solution or even an answer, but since I use X and openbox
in much the same way as you do, I took a quick look at the involved
processes.  What I see is that openbox and even its direct children
(ie. GUI apps) keep the controlling terminal inherited from startx -
i.e. the VT where you run startx from.

To me this looks like a bug in xinit.  It should drop the controlling
terminal when forking the "master" app, that is openbox in this case.

But maybe a work-around would be to drop it in openbox instead, subject
to an option?

Unfortunately this area is one that is getting taken over by systemd -
see for example

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gentoo/user/320739

so, I suspect that any solution will have to be self-supported.

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