What to do when X crashes?

ChojinDSL · l33t Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 784

Thankfully this has happened very rarely. But I think most people might have experienced this at one time or another.

What I'd like to know is, whats the recommended procedure for dealing with X locking up?
By lock up I mean, the picture froze, the keyboard and mouse dont respond anymore, but you can still ssh into your box.

Should you always reboot, or is there a simple way to make the system unload and reload the keyboard and mouse drivers and then reload the desktop?

AliasXZ · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 12:27 pm Post subject:

i take it the caps lock light and scroll light are not flashing on the keyboard?
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anil_et · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jul 2002 Posts: 98

ssh from another machine and

Fran · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:05 pm Post subject:

And if you don't have another machine: acpid. You can assign an action to the case power button.

Chaosite · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:37 pm Post subject:

Fran · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 3:00 pm Post subject:

cbr · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 3:43 pm Post subject:

Enable Magic SysRq from kernel menuconfig Kernel Hacking subsection. And upon X lockup just press Shift-PrintScrn-K. (SysRq-K) That will kill the application in the current VT, in your case X. It doesn't always work but in several cases it does. SysRq-S is also an emergency disk cache flush IIRC.

ChojinDSL · l33t Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 784

Ok, I knew about the magic sysrq key and sshing into it via another machine. All good so far.
But is there any way to deal with this, WITHOUT having to reboot?

Perhaps if the driver for mouse and keyboard were modules, would it then be possible to rmmod/modprobe all the relevant display and input drivers and kill&restart X so that you dont have to reboot?