User Processes | Dirk Mittler's Blog

Today the Debian / Jessie package maintainers pushed through an update to my X-server, bringing that up to version ‘2:1.16.4-1+deb8u1‘. In a case like this, it’s better to restart the session, just to load the new X-server version, but also, to make sure that any problems in running the X-server do not take us by surprise, during some later reboot.

As it happens, the computer this took place on, which I name ‘Phoenix‘, is also my Web-server. And so it’s desirable to perform the restart of the session, without doing a full reboot of the computer. Under Linux, with the ‘KDE’ desktop manager, we can do this by just Logging Out, and then Logging back In. Doing so also causes an X-server restart.

Not doing a full reboot of my computer, also meant that my Apache Web-server continued running, without causing any disruption to the visibility of my Web-site, or of this blog.

Yet, there was a glitch. As I told my user-session to log out, the display hanged, with the mouse-pointer still visible, but with the rest of my display black, and with no further activity on the hard-drive. In this situation I can help myself, by using the KDE, <Ctrl>+<Alt>+Backspace key-combination, to force an X-server restart. Doing so successfully ended my user-session. Then, the X-server restarted, and I got to log back in.

What this means is that the preparatory work I did according to this earlier posting, has paid off.

I count this as a successful update.

Dirk

This morning, effectively as I slept, my Linux computer named ‘Phoenix’ downloaded and installed a set of updates, to KDE, which is the framework installed on this computer, for managing the display of my Desktop / GUI, as well as for PIM. Because this update installed itself unattended, it meant that user-processes were still running, which did not have the latest version of the software loaded into RAM.

This can happen easily on Linux computer-systems, which generally just keep working that way – in the short term. But in the long term, eventually something is going to want to wake up a KDE-program which is not already running, and which will want to use the latest images, at which point some sort of incompatibility could set in.

Fortunately though, KDE will only affect user-processes, as I just wrote, but will not affect system-processes, such as my Apache Web-server, or the instance of the MySQL-server, which is running as a system- rather than as a user-process. And so what I can do in this case, is just log out the user, and log him back in. Doing so also reloads the X-server, which does a shutdown as well, and restarts the graphics-driver.

Both the update to KDE, as well as my log-out, log-in maneuver, worked well, without any hint at first glance, of anything going wrong. As a result, the availability of the site and my blog were unaffected. Also, the ‘memcached‘ process is a system-process that did not require any restart, so that the responsiveness of my blog, to the most-frequent requests for postings from readers, should still be as quick as it was only 30 minutes ago.

Dirk

Tag: User Processes

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