Timing issue (race) with kdm and hal during boot?
Petter Reinholdtsen
pere at hungry.com
Wed Aug 12 06:54:33 UTC 2009
When I enabled readahead-fedora on a freshly installed unstable KDE
desktop with dependency based boot sequencing, a strange thing
happened. KDM started X, but the keyboard did not work. I tried two
things based on the idea that kdm depend on something started later,
and suspecting it was hal. First I tried to make kdm depend on
network-manager. This got the keyboard working. network-manager
depend on hal, so the time separation between kdm and hal was
increased. Next, I dropped that dependency and made hal interactive,
pushing it further ahead in the boot sequence. This worked too, and
likewise made hal and kdm start further apart.
I do not know what the cause of this problem is, but suspect hal is
not yet operational when its init.d script is started, and X need an
operational hal to find its keyboard settings. Not sure how we should
solve this. Race conditions like this will make it impossible to
speed up the boot. I suspect we will find more of them when the boot
become faster, and thus exposing latent problems currently hidden
because of the slowness of the current boot.
Happy hacking,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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