Announcing Fedora 11 Alpha (blink)

Adam Jackson ajax at redhat.com
Tue Feb 10 16:43:39 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 11:33 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 20:08 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >  > The problem, as has already been mentioned and which you seem to
> > have 
> > > overlooked is that when an administrator finds it's locked up, it's
> > too 
> > > late to fix it.
> > 
> > If it is really locked up, the current change won't affect you. A
> > half 
> > struck system, it is matter of restarting and resetting it. You can 
> > avoid that even, if you read up what has changed as any good 
> > administrator should.
> 
> My system just locked up. No response to Ctrl-Alt-BSpace, Ctrl-Alt-Fn,
> even Ctrl-Alt-Del. I logged in via ssh from my iPhone and brought it
> down gently, though I could of course have simply changed run levels.
> 
> In this kind of situation it would be nice to have an unblockable
> attention key, like SysRq but not so low-level. Something that would
> simply force the system into VT2 for example, and didn't depend on X
> working.

You can't do that, really.  Getting to vt2 requires getting X to let go
of the hardware, because the vt subsystem is a raging pile of trash that
we would be _far_ better off just deleting.  Read that again: X has to
voluntarily relinquish the hardware.  If it isn't responding to c-a-bs,
it certainly isn't going to respond to any other requests.

But nooooo.  Gotta keep having VTs so we can recover when X screws up.
I mean, it's the unix way.  Which apparently means designing failure in
from the start, and calling it a feature.

This is a bad design.  The panic button doesn't make it better, it just
makes it okay to be even worse than the design requires.  Take the
training wheels off already.

- ajax
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