ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Oliver Grawert <ogra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

hi,

during the course of researching bug [1]  (filling $HOME to 100%)
several obstacles with our session startup were found that (unlike on
the desktop) prevent the session from coming up at all ... we can not
actually prevent the user from filling $HOME, but we can also not accept
that you end up with a black screen (and for bonus points you should
also still be able to make emergency calls even when your home is not
writeable adn we should be able to pop up an error message for the user
asking to free some space to retain normal operation) 

our session manager itself as well as many of the upstart jobs simply
assume that they can write to the users home dir on startup.
other processes actually expect that files the session manager or
upstart jobs created are there for reading  ...

while we forcefully reserve 5% of the system partition for root so that
system processes will have enough space even if the user fills his home
dir this will only help with low level system functionality up to
lightdm but break in case of auto login as we use it, when user owned
processes take over.

during the next days i will start reworking our session manager
completely to only use $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and /tmp for writing and as well
export variables into the upstart session environment instead of writing
"dot files" in the home directory of the user for being read later on.

if your code owns any upstart job, script, tool or whatever that writes
to home or relies on reading from a file in home that another process
created, please move it to use either of the above dirs instead, have it
use "initctl set-env" from your upstart job or at least (if the writing
is not a critical feature of your app/service) shield the line in your
code that tries to write with "|| true" from failing.

if your code expects any files to be filled with info from other jobs,
please adapt to the new location or new handling of information (reading
env vars from the upstart environment etc)

this is a big change and i will start contacting people over it while we
move along, it spans across many sources and files so please help
getting this issue fixed.

ciao
	oli

[1]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-touch-session/+bug/1316978

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