Samsung Dealing With Wayland "Zombie Apocalypse" Bug

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Samsung Dealing With Wayland "Zombie Apocalypse" Bug

Samsung OSG developers have been investigating and dealing with a nasty Wayland bug whereby a Wayland event could be delivered to an incorrect file descriptor. This ends up being due to a shortcoming in the Wayland protocol, but as to not break all existing software out there built against the current Wayland protocol, a workaround has been devised...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Samsung-Wayland-Zombie

[tildearrow]

Typo:

creating a zombie each time an object is instatiated and will live on past the object's lifespan.

[paupav]

I've told you that Mir is the future.

[PluMGMK]

I don't like to be negative, but this is starting to sound awfully cruft-accumulatory, which is supposed to be what Wayland was designed to avoid.

[Azpegath]

I don't like to be negative, but this is starting to sound awfully cruft-accumulatory, which is supposed to be what Wayland was designed to avoid.

I felt the same, but I my guess is that the idea is to fix the issue in the protocol in the next (major?) version, but to supply a fix for the issue for clients of the existing version.

[boxie]

I felt the same, but I my guess is that the idea is to fix the issue in the protocol in the next (major?) version, but to supply a fix for the issue for clients of the existing version.

I would have thought that the solution would be to fix the protocol and force an update

[starshipeleven]

I would have thought that the solution would be to fix the protocol and force an update

we all know none does that in the embedded world.

When you can hack around the problem instead of fixing it, you do.

[MadCatX]

Okay, I know the need some sort of a fix that will work with the current rest of the stack but it sounds like a nasty kludge. It would be interesting to hear from the Wayland people if they intend to fix the protocol in the future.

[TMM_]

Given the problem this is actually a rather elegant solution. It's a little hacky for sure but it's an ELEGANT hack given the problem at hand. Serious kudos to who came up with this.

[DrYak]

I would have thought that the solution would be to fix the protocol and force an update

Keep in mind that Wayland is currently deployed in the wild. It's not only something developed for some upcoming Fedora beta, there are devices running it in production right now :
- I think that Samsung has been using it in their Tizen -powered phones
- Jolla has been using it in the mer core of their Sailfish OS, all the way back from their first smartphone.

I takes some time until an update is approved downstream into an embed system. (Will the completely new Wayland version with the updated version continue to work as expected with all the currently deployed component in production ? including 3rd parties app ? including binary-only 3rd party apps for which the source code can't be simply recompiled by some instances of suse's Open Build System ?)

Not everyone is Apple and is completely happy with completely breaking all the apps by completely changing the API every now and then. (Of course I'm exagerating a bit, Apple still made the efforts of creating the Carbon API upgrade path)

(On the other hand, not everyone is Microsoft with a giant unstable about-to-explode (-and-actually-exploding-quite-regularily) giant katamary of duck tape for an API containing more unmaintained legacy cruft than actually sanctioned APIs.
That's why X11 was eventually replaced with Wayland in Linux, and that's why eventually an updated protocol will be rolled out in an upcoming Wayland major upgrade. Just not today.)