Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 64664
KDE font installer uses "xfs restart", crashes X
Last modified: 2005-10-31 17:00:50 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.0.0-10; Linux) Description of problem: Within the KDE Control Center > System > Font Installer > Settings Tab > X System it has settings to refresh X's font list after it has installed new fonts. The default setting is "/etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart" I am quite sure that doing this will ALWAYS freeze X because it loses its current connection to xfs. At least that's the behavior that I experience on my LTSP and local installations. A setting of "/etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs reload" would have the desired effect, without crashing the current X session. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Red Hat 7.3 (Valhalla) fresh install How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install fonts with KDE Font Installer. 2. Apply and allow it to restart xfs with its default settings. Actual Results: X freezes up after it lost its connection to the original xfs daemon. Expected Results: X shouldn't freeze up.
Correct. "service xfs restart" should never under any circumstance be executed while the X server is running. "service xfs reload" should be used instead. This did actually work a while back, because the xfs initscript incorrectly made restart work like reload.
We might want to suggest rpmlint get a new test for this for rpm scripts to ensure xfs initscript isn't called with restart except on xfs upgrade.
Created attachment 60966 [details] quick-n-dirty (ie, untested) patch to replace xfs restart with xfs reload.
Created attachment 60988 [details] attempt #2
Still appears to be broken in Limbo. I haven't tested it, but it still says "restart" in the KDE font installer config.
This bug is a high priority since not fixing it will likely cause odd bug reports coming in of X crashing for a seemingly unknown reason, which would waste a lot of troubleshooting time. The above patch above should do it. Please apply.
It's now fixed in kdebase-3.0.2-3.
None of the changes above have been applied to kdebase-3.0.2-6. Still calling xfs restart in all cases.
This is ABSOLUTELY critical to get fixed. Calling restart will kill the X server 100% of the time, and must NOT be done. I may remove the "restart" entry from the initscript entirely just to make sure that it does not get called, since it will fry the X server. The only reason it is there, is to allow restarting the xfs server when X is *not* running, using FHS/LSB initscript semantics.
The font installer is pretty pointless anyway since all Qt3 and GTK 2 apps won't see the fonts, right? Or are they installed somewhere that fonts.conf lists?
Jay, are you sure that you have started KDE font installer in kcontrol->System->Font installer? The kdebase-3.0.2-3 or newer already included this fix. It uses "xfs reload" instead "xfs restart". I have tested it and it works for me after i added/removed some fonts with KDE font installer. Could you please check again? thanks Havoc: you can give font path to KDE font installer. Default are /usr/share/fonts and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts. Of course all X applications/Qt3/Gnome 2 will see these fonts, because the settings will be saved in /etc/X11/fs/config