I did my most sucessfull GNU/Linux install yesterday on my friend's
computer. He's a windows user that I had convinced with a few screenshots
to install linux on his old Pentium 133.
As he did the insatllation of RedHat and I directed him over the
telephone, things seemed to work pretty well. X worked on the first try,
networking took a few minutes, and we insatlled all kinds of eye candy
like enlightenment and gnome without any trouble. After he had used it for
about 90 minutes, it crashed. I'm not sure how, but I would assume X
freezed up since this is a windows user by nature and probably remembers
that when the cursor freezes, you're dead.
Perhaps just X windows itself locked up but left the kernel running
behind it...
So the machine dropped him into single-user mode to fix filesystem
problems. Scared the hell out of him. I taught him how to use fdisk and
fix his errors.
Sorry for saying that X windows is likely to crash the system when of
course we all know that, but maybe the next story will be a little better.
Here's an exercise: start x, start netscape, kill x (lets say its
segfaulted or you need to kill it with c-a-backspace becuase it's not
responding). Now look at your load average. Netscape has gone crazy. It's
probably in an infinite loop.
The same thing happened to my friend _for_no_apparent_reason_. Suddenly
you would notice that the load average was high and I would have to tell
him to kill netscape and gmc. (I think it happened 4 or 5 times with
netscape and once with gmc.) The load average gets pretty high when 3
processes have gone into infinite loops!
I suppose that this is a bug in a few applications. Still, it is not
acceptable in a server setting to come in a few days latter and find that
3 netscape processes that i thought were long gone had gone into infinite
loops.
Perhaps the kernel should kill processes that go into infinite loops. I am
not sure how that would be possible, especially when it is perfectly
accectable to use 100% of the cpu (examples: rc5des, crack). For some
reason, these phantom processes usually do not end up using the full 100%
of the cpu. its usually more like 50%, but if 3 are running tahn thats an
attempted 150% load on a poor little box. I've had similar thinks happen
on my machine too, but usually only when X is killed.
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