[xmonad] bringing xmonad into the threaded world

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 5:29 AM, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

> > There have been various times when I've wished I could just spawn a
> > thread in xmonad. Just recently, for example, it was pointed out to me
> >   that the default mod+q binding starts a brand new process just to
> > keep  xmonad responsive while it recompiles the configuration file.
> > This is  silly.
>

I'm not convinced that is either a problem or "silly", but it can be
changed without changing X11 to threaded because it doesn't actually use
X11 in a dangerous way within a thread.

Also be aware that a number of contrib modules *already* use threads...
green threads, which open their own $DISPLAY connections.  This is entirely
safe as long as you don't do something that would block in an FFI call or
that would expect the xmonad main loop to run while simultaneously
expecting a *synchronous* response (as the infamous putSelection did).

Why is it silly? It's not like the overhead of starting a new process
> is going to be anything but noise compared to recompiling the
> configuration file.
>

Indeed.  ghc and its invocation of ld are going to be the visibly expensive
part.


> > Here is a patch bundle that makes xmonad ask X to be thread-safe, and
> > rewrites the default mod+q binding to take advantage of the new thread
> >   safety.
>
> What's the performance hit from making X thread-safe?
>

Significant.  It's worth remembering that one of the more significant open
bugs has to do with spending too much time context switching with the X
server when sweeping the mouse across multiple windows... this will get a
*lot* worse if Xlib is constantly grabbing and releasing a mutex on every
single call (which is how it does thread safety; it's not even remotely
smart about it).

For that matter, if you are using Haskell threads instead of OS
> threads, do you need to make X thread safe? [Sorry if this is a silly
> question - I'm not really familiar with using Haskell threads.]
>

Green threads are fine, aside from you can't safely use the main connection
to the Display because you can't push back arbitrary numbers of arbitrary
events that you don't care about, and if you silently drop them because you
don't care about them then the main loop isn't seeing stuff it needs to
see.  As mentioned above, the usual workaround is to open your own
connection.

Building xmonad with -threaded gets you OS threads, with all their
potential problems.

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
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