[Splashy-devel] My Tests.

[Tim Dijkstra]

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:27:03 -0500
Pat Suwalski <pats at xandros.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I never got around to doing the splashy tests at lunch a few days ago,
> but I did take a few hours tonight.

Good that somebody else is looking into this. Thanks!

> First, on a clean "unstable" install, the progress locks up on
> rcS.d/S05keymap.sh, 

I think this is a known problem (and was worked around)

> If we remove S05keymap, it still gets started later on in init, on my
> clean install it happens right between sysklog and klog in rc2. 

How do you know? 

> Probably something to do with the LSB dependency field in the init scripts.

On a standard debian install these LSB fields do nothing.

> Now, I have commented before about how splashy seems to use tty0 and
> tty2. The latter is used for apparently no reason. This has struck me as
> odd before, about a year ago, iirc.

Maybe this is a directfb feature where it redirects part of its output to
another vt?

> I have attached an lsof output from initramfs right before init
> executes. You can see that splashy has many open files, but particularly
> tty0, tty2, and vcs1. Also, unless I am mistaken, there are seven (7!)
> splashy processes. I expected 2: one parent, one child. The child has
> spawned 5 processes of its own; this is highly suspect.

As Luis said, splashy has many threads.
 
> Long story short, what I witnessed tonight is exactly what I witnessed a
> year ago: resource contention. Splashy takes two ttys, stays on one of
> them, init is forced to take another, things expect to be on the tty
> that init is on, there is a lock.

Well, this sounds logical, but it doesn't tell me anything. Why is it a
problem we're taking two tty's? Also if we're started after init, we do
the same, I think.

Another point that might be interesting, when using upstart, this all
doesn't happen.

> Something I had meant to experiment with last year (never got the
> chance), was to make splashy open a higher tty by default, say tty6 or
> tty9. Perhaps if init is on tty0 it will be happier. Maybe there could
> be some experimentation whether a tty even needs to be opened?
 
I tried that, but it didn't help. What I did is chvt to 12 before we init
the directfb.

grts Tim