Reconnectable X - improve desktop reliability

[Callum Lerwick]

On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 13:56 -0500, Chris Tyler wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 18:01 +0000, Jeremy Sanders wrote:
> > I have searched around, but I haven't been able to find out whether anyone 
> > has managed to make an X server which was reconnectable by the applications 
> > talking to it.
> > 
> > What I mean is that it would be nice to have all the existing applications 
> > carry on running if X dies underneath them. They could then connect to a new 
> > server when it became available.
> > 
> > Perhaps this is an application rather than X.org issue. Perhaps some sort of 
> > simple layer could sit between the apps and the server to solve the 
> > reconnection.
> > 
> > Could someone with some knowledge of how this works comment on whether this 
> > would be feasible?
> > 
> > It would really help Fedora reliability if the desktop could survive X 
> > crashes. It would also allow the possibility of disconnecting an X session 
> > and reconnecting it later (I know vnc and nx allow this sort of thing).
> 
> Along the same line but perhaps more interesting than 'reconnectable' X
> would be 'reroutable' X, where you could redirect output from a local
> display to a projector (Star Trek: "On ViewScreen!"). This can be done
> with proxies or double-rendering, but it would be interesting to try it
> at the toolkit level.

The toolkit level is apparently where the original designers of X
intended it to happen:

http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004-html/

(A must read, though a bit dated, as much of this work has been
completed at this point. :)

The "Change Display" example in gtk-demo shows that display migration is
possible with GTK, right now.
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