Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!ur-tut!ur-valhalla!socrates.ee.rochester.edu!deke
From: deke@socrates.ee.rochester.edu (Deke Kassabian)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Broken display lock
Summary: re-acquire the lock
Message-ID: <1401@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu>
Date: 3 Aug 88 15:09:01 GMT
References: <8808022253.AA13019@vitsun.com>
Sender: usenet@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu
Reply-To: deke@socrates.ee.rochester.edu (Deke Kassabian)
Organization: UR Dept. of Electrical Engg, Rochester NY 14627
Lines: 34


In article <8808022253.AA13019@vitsun.com> pat@vitsun.UUCP (Patrick Turley) writes:
>In article <2126@ssc-vax.UUCP> dmg@ssc-vax.UUCP (David Geary) writes:
>>"Window display lock broken because process xxxx blocked"
>
>In SunView, processes obtain locks from the windowing system before they
>write to the screen. These locks time out after 1 second of virtual process
>time (I think that's right - check the SunView manual if the precise number
>interests you). If the lock is broken, that is the message you get.

That sounds about right.  I would agree that this suntools behaviour is
probably the equivalent of what David is seeing in NeWS.  I do have NeWS,
but haven't seen this happen yet.

> I was once interested in increasing the timeout value
>and called up Sun software support to find out if it was a system parameter
>that I could fiddle with in some configuration file or something. It turns
>out that it doesn't appear in a any configuration file but you can
>increase it by poking a particular location in the kernel. Of course, that
>means the new value is only good until the system goes down. Perhaps this
>could be automated by feeding adb's stdin with a script in rc.local.

The better way, or at least the more common handling, is to "re-acquire"
the lock *before* the timeout occurs.  The timeout is necessary, by the
way, to prevent a lock from remaining after a process has unexpectedly died.
But this is digressing and becoming a Suntools conversation.  Are we correct
in assuming that this NeWS behaviour is analogous to the Suntools windowlock?

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