[10386] in Athena Bugs
rsaix 7.5B: IBM RS/6000 X server core dump
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (cwitty@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Tue Mar 23 15:06:59 1993
From: cwitty@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 15:06:54 EST
System name: m11-113-4
Type and version: POWER 7.5B
Display type: colorgda
What were you trying to do?
I had logged into two other systems (luke.lcs.mit.edu and
battle-creek.ai.mit.edu), and run Emacs on both of them (the X version
of Emacs). Both of them had come up, and I was typing in one of them.
What's wrong:
The X server screen vanished and was replaced by the console screen
(the one with no graphics, showing a "login:" prompt). Then, after a
few seconds, that screen disappeared, X started up, and it showed me
the "Welcome to Athena" login screen.
I hypothesized that the X server had core dumped, and that the core
file would be in /, so I looked to see if there was a recently created
/core. There was. I then did "dbx /usr/bin/X11/X /core" to see if it
was a core file for the X server, and it seems to be.
There's a copy of the core file in /mit/cwitty/core, if you want to
look at it.
What should have happened:
The X server shouldn't have core dumped.
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
(Note: The following is a joke. Don't take it seriously.)
I'm not aware of any specific claims in the X documentation that say
anything like "The X server shouldn't core dump", or "It's a bug if
the X server crashes". The closest I can come is the following quote
from the Emacs info manual:
> If Emacs executes an illegal instruction, or dies with an operating
> system error message that indicates a problem in the program (as
> opposed to something like "disk full"), then it is certainly a bug.
Even if this is extended to apply to the X server as well as to Emacs,
it's hard to be sure that the criteria have been met. I don't know
whether it died with an operating system error message that indicates
a problem in the program. If it did print such an error message, I
didn't see it, and I'm not sure where it would have gone. If it would
have gone to /tmp/xlogfile, it's gone now, because that was
overwritten when the new X started up.
