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

D.T. turkuting at gmail.com
Mon Jan 2 02:59:20 EST 2017


I have noticed the exact same behavior for ncurses applications started directly from a launcher, i.e. not inside a terminal window. The launcher was dmenu in my case, and I probably wasn't even running openbox. I do however start all my window managers from .xinitrc.

Other terminal apps just fail silently, only ncurses apps cause that sort of soft freeze.
Killing them was sufficient iirc.



On January 2, 2017 1:26:56 AM EET, Ian Zimmerman <itz at primate.net> wrote:
>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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