Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 2767
xterms don't die after logging out from X login screen
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
If I login via the X login screen (runlevel 5), start a couple xterms, then logout, the xterms stay around. This is really bizarre because my understanding is that the X server is restarted, so I don't know how they can hang around after the X server dies, but they do. I'm using GNOME. This happens regardless of whether the xterms are started automatically by the GNOME session or not. It does not happen with other X apps.
I see this too. It's annoying. Looks like X needs an update due to other reported bugs so.... :-)
Confirmed in the test lab.
*** Bug 2883 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** After leaving the xsession all processes started within it should be also killed. Thats not true for the bash started with xterm. I usually have 5-6 xterms on my xsession and after a few rounds of stop and start the X there were some tenths of 'bash' still running. Of course you can always kill them, either manually or using a script, or there must be a way to prevent that happening. But, it should not happen by default and for a novice user thats not a nice behaviour since after some period of continuous uptime the number of processes will exceed the limit. ------- Additional Comments From raul@cantara.com 05/18/99 17:10 ------- I believe this is a dup of bug #2767, which I entered on 5/14/99. I don't know if this is related, but I've noticed that if you start an xterm without the "&" (i.e. it's in the shell foreground), then hit Ctrl-c, it won't die, but it will freeze up. I'm almost 100% sure that this situation should, and normally does, just kill the xterm.
*** Bug 2854 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** xterm cannot process SIGINT. When it gets a SIGINT this happens (shown from strace): select(7, [4 6], [], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted) --- SIGINT (Interrupt) --- fork() = 9747 wait4(9747, NULL, 0, NULL) = 9747 --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) --- wait4(-1, after that it hangs and can only be killed with SIGTERM/SIGKILL. This is unique to the RH6 xterm, Dickey's latest version or earlier versions didn't have that problem. It has been observed on a Alpha too. -Andi ------- Additional Comments From jbj@redhat.com 05/16/99 16:38 ------- *** Bug 2853 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** xterm cannot process SIGINT. When it gets a SIGINT this happens (shown from strace): select(7, [4 6], [], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted) --- SIGINT (Interrupt) --- fork() = 9747 wait4(9747, NULL, 0, NULL) = 9747 --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) --- wait4(-1, after that it hangs and can only be killed with SIGTERM/SIGKILL. This is unique to the RH6 xterm, Dickey's latest version or earlier versions didn't have that problem. It has been observed on a Alpha too. -Andi
*** Bug 3215 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** I'm not sure whether or not the problem is a kernel signal delivery one, or whether it's just the new version of Xfree programs being flaky, but I'm finding this extremely annoying. If I kill an xterm with a SIGTERM, it goes comatose instead of killing its child shell and going away. select(8, [6 7], [], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted) --- SIGTERM (Terminated) --- fork() = 1350 wait4(1350, NULL, 0, NULL) = 1350 --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) --- wait4(-1, at which point it just sits, which of course during a logout leads to a bunch of xterms and their child shells sitting around in the process table, eating ptys and memory for not reason at all. The same fate awaits any processes run from a user's .xsession. if a SIGHUP is sent to the child shell, then the xterm exits. Repeating the same experiment on a NetBSD box leads to the expected results, with no orphaned xterms in the process table after a logout. I'm running a 400Mhz K6-2, stepping 12, with kernel 2.2.5 as shipped with RH6.0 I have tried kernels 2.2.4, 2.2.9, and 2.3.4 compiled with gcc 2.7.2.3 and egcs without any success. This signal misdelivery also shows up on my AMD 5x86-133 at home, also running RH6.0 with distributed 2.2.5 kernel.
*** Bug 3359 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** If I exit the X server via alt-control-backspace, the xterm provided with RedHat 6.0 does not seem to terminate. If I run the 5.2 xterm binary from your XFree-3.3.3.1 it does terminate when the X server goes away (as well as every version of xterm I have ever used in the last 11-12 years). This is a major annoyance. I have temporarily worked around the problem by using the 5.2 version.
This problem can be fixed by installing utempter-0.5-2 from Raw Hide. An errata will be out in the next day or so.