[maemo-developers] Continuous reboot problem with the N770 hacker edition

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

Daniel Stone wrote:
>> However, without X server or D-BUS you cannot use the device at all
>> and all your UI processes exit automatically, so it doesn't make sense
>> to try to "keep the device up" if those exit/crash.
> 
> The sensible solution is to pull the desktop down and restart it along
> with the X server, instead of panicking and rebooting the device.
> Unfortunately, our init system (osso-af-init) is so horribly designed
> that it's almost impossible to do[0] without just blowing away our init
> system and starting again _from scratch_.  Which is arguably what we
> should do, anyway.

Well, I don't see that much value in optimizing failures/crashes.

The time is better spent in making sure that user doesn't lose her
data in first place.  I.e. after fixing everything, making sure
that services which might crash e.g. due to user installing something
broken, are restartable (i.e. don't need reboot) and otherwise more
failsafe (e.g. Desktop disabling applets if it crashes).

If user anyway lost her data (like happens when X server or D-BUS
crashes), there's no point in trying to bring up a potentially broken
environment. Crashing second time could make the recovery actually
slower :-)


> [0]: I had an ndm for exactly this internally, but due to the init
>      scripts being so incredibly broken both by horrible design and
>      awful implementation, the init scripts always returned failure,
>      even if they succeeded.  Go figure.

Why do you want to do this?  It might be useful for upgrading
the device without reboots...


	- Eero