ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Evan Dandrea <ev@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Stuart Langridge brought up an interesting idea for this on IRC, which
I'm copying here rather than having more side discussions:

(10:13:20) aquarius: ev, just reading your thread about runaway
processes on the touch mailing list (I'm not subscribed to the list,
so there's no good way of replying), and I had a thought: it seems to
be primarily about *accidental* runaways (I put an infinite loop in my
code by mistake), and all the discussion is "how do we know if this
process is actually accidental, or if it's deliberately using 100% CPU
because it's properly
(10:13:20) aquarius: busy doing a lot? The thought is: provide an API
call yesIAmReallyBusy which you can call every few seconds while
you're busy and then the runaway-killer will know you're not a runaway
and will ignore you. This is how screensaver stuff works -- your
movie-playing app calls "ignoreTheScreenSaverForAMinute" every minute,
and then you don't have to worry about holding locks or anything, and
if your app crashes the
(10:13:20) aquarius: screensaver doesn't stay disabled.
(10:14:22) Evan: aquarius: did you see cking's reply? It seems to be
going down this route of "can we tell between accidental runaway and
purposeful"
(10:15:55) aquarius: ev, I did. The discussion is about being clever
around trying to identify from outside the runaway process whether it
is runaway or not, which is a useful thing to have if you can do it
certainly. What I'm suggesting is making it explicit -- a system
service should throw a yesIReallyAmBusy() into its high-CPU processing
loop, and then we don't *have* to dwim it; we'll know.
(10:20:32) aquarius: ev, I brought it up in case clever people like
you and cking might say "we can't do that because $REASONS"; if you
think it's worth bringing it up for discussion then I think that's a
good idea. Two reasons I can see against it: the first is that if I
drop yesIReallyAmBusy() into my main processing loop and that loop has
a bug which makes it run infinitely by accident then I'm now immume
from being killed, which
(10:20:32) aquarius: is bad. Secondly, it suggests that if this comes
to the desktop that things like Firefox would need to drop a
yesIReallyAmBusy() all over the place, which they ought to do (because
they want to be a good citizen on Ubuntu) but probably won't (because
being a good citizen on Ubuntu isn't a big enough deal to them).