[xmonad] forkIO & xmonad

[Daniel Schoepe]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 03:42:14PM +0200, Nils wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm trying to write a little status bar extension, which allows
> X.U.Loggers (and other) to be piped into dzen2 which then gets updated
> every X seconds (the dynamicLogHooks update only after an xmonad event).
> So I thought, forkIO with a threadDelay should do the job, but something
> weird happened.
> 
> The code is: http://paste.n-sch.de/0y/hs
> 
> Then run it with:
> 
> > main = do
> >   runStatusbar $ defaultStatusBar "dzen"
> >   xmonad $ ...
> 
> If I start xmonad like this, the forked process stops after a short
> amount of time and continues only when I hit some xmonad-keybindings
> (even that happens pretty random). For example, if I remove the
> threadDelay from the previous code, you would expect to have a never
> ending counter in your dzen bar. But it starts counting up to about
> 10000, stops and waits for some input and (maybe) continues counting for
> another 1000 or 2000.
> 
> Can anyone see why xmonad acts like this with forkIO?

The problem is that xmonad is not compiled with -threaded, which is
needed to make forkIO work properly with blocking FFI calls. In this
case the problem is that getEvent also blocks all threads created with
forkIO which is the reason for the behavior you are experiencing.

The next problem is that compiling xmonad with -threaded is
potentially dangerous, since xlib is not reentrant, so making X calls
in multiple threads can lead to lockups which also happened in
practice, when dons tried that.

So one could either add -threaded to the compilation flags and
instruct everyone not to use any X-related functionality in the new
thread, with the downside that bad code can cause lockups, or port
xmonad to xhb which is fully reentrant, if I recall correctly.

A third option would be to add bindings for Xlib's locking
mechanisms[1] in haskell-x11 and use those in the new thread.

[1] http://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/display/threads.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/attachments/20091024/980a1313/attachment.bin