RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.
Bug 613704 - Metacity doesn't restart when it dies or is killed
Summary: Metacity doesn't restart when it dies or is killed
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Classification: Red Hat
Component: metacity
Version: 6.0
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: rc
: ---
Assignee: Owen Taylor
QA Contact: desktop-bugs@redhat.com
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2010-07-12 15:48 UTC by jmccann
Modified: 2015-01-14 23:25 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2010-08-02 22:17:42 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description jmccann 2010-07-12 15:48:14 UTC 
Sending a kill or segv to metacity causes it to exit.  What is unexpected is that it doesn't restart.  Either metacity isn't requesting that the session restart it or the session isn't doing the right thing.
Comment 4 Owen Taylor 2010-08-02 22:17:42 UTC 
The behavior of Metacity is that it:

 - Restarts if it dies abnormally - SEGV, KILL, etc
 - Does not restart if killed with signals it catches like TERM or PIPE

This seems like a reasonable behavior - why would you kill metacity with TERM if you wanted it to start immediately?

Testing with metacity-2.28.0-15.el6 2.28.0-18.el6:

 killall -SEGV metacity # restarts
 killall -KILL metacity # restarts
 killall -TERM metacity # does not restart

Note that there is a bug in gnome-session (not metacity) that means that metacity doesn't restart unless it was started by gnome-session (either at login or as a restart after crashing). 

That means in particular that after metacity does not restart in the above sequence, if you start it manually from a terminal, it will never restart until you log out and log back in.

This would also come up if you switched to compiz using desktop-effects and switched back.

I filed this upstream as:

 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625881

But I don't think this gnome-session bug is a critical bug for RHEL:

 - Switching window managers isn't the normal case - almost all the time metacity will have been started by gnome-session and will properly restart.
 - Metacity isn't supposed to crash in the first place! The restart code is just there as a backup safety measure.

Closing this as NOTABUG, since the Metacity behavior is as intended and the gnome-session bug is separate.
Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.