Bug#813728: boinc-client: spews "No protocol specified" every second when active

Fri Feb 5 03:27:44 UTC 2016

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Ugh. There's no clean way to do this that I can find, especially given
BOINC's custom handling of stdout and stderr. The closest solution
I've found that actually starts to be (thread, context, etc) safe is her
e:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5419356/redirect-stdout-stderr-to-a-
string

(The response from Sir Digby Chicken Caesar)

And it feels like complete overkill for what's going on. Other hacky
solutions exist --freopen() et.al.-- but I don't know if it'll step on
the toes of other parts of the boinc-client.

I can just do a poor man's timer with a decrement counter, only
retrying failing DISPLAYs every $number of minutes, which would ease
up on the amount of entries at least.

I'm going to keep mulling this over in case I can find out a better
way to handle this.

Cheers,
Preston Maness

On 02/04/2016 04:53 PM, Preston Maness wrote:
> Howdy howdy,
> 
> I suspect this is related to XOpenDisplay() calls failing during
> idle detection (due to the Xserver being inaccessible for some
> reason). It shouldn't be harming performance of the boinc-client in
> any way, but I'll look into suppressing the log spam when the
> relevant calls fail. I had already pushed all the debug log info to
> an optional, non-default flag, but it looks like the XSS library
> might have a hard-coded printf somewhere.
> 
> The "idle_detection_debug" log flag can be put in cc_config.xml
> file:
> 
> <cc_config> <log_flags> <task>1</task> <file_xfer>1</file_xfer> 
> <sched_ops>1</sched_ops> <coproc_debug>1</coproc_debug> 
> <idle_detection_debug>1</idle_detection_debug> </log_flags> 
> </cc_config>
> 
> See
> 
> https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/pull/1453
> 
> for the relevant pull request where I reinstated and improved the 
> XSS-based idle detection.
> 
> Cheers, Preston Maness
> 
> On 02/04/2016 01:00 PM, Aaron M. Ucko wrote:
>> Package: boinc-client Version: 7.6.22+dfsg-3 Severity: minor
> 
>> Since upgrading to boinc-client 7.6.22+dfsg-3 last night (when
>> it hit testing), I've observed it to log "No protocol specified"
>> once a second, except when suspended, per the log excerpt below.
>> As far as I can tell, it otherwise continues to work fine, but
>> these messages are getting to be a nuisance.
> 
>> Could you please take a look?
> 
>> Thanks!
> 
>> Feb  4 09:54:09 ghostwheel boinc[13404]: No protocol specified
>> Feb 4 09:54:10 ghostwheel boinc[13404]: No protocol specified Feb
>> 4 09:54:11 ghostwheel boinc[13404]: No protocol specified Feb  4 
>> 09:54:12 ghostwheel boinc[13404]: 04-Feb-2016 09:54:12 [---] 
>> Suspending computation - computer is in use Feb  4 10:04:17 
>> ghostwheel boinc[13404]: No protocol specified Feb  4 10:04:17 
>> ghostwheel boinc[13404]: 04-Feb-2016 10:04:17 [---] Resuming 
>> computation Feb  4 10:04:18 ghostwheel boinc[13404]: No protocol 
>> specified Feb  4 10:04:19 ghostwheel boinc[13404]: No protocol 
>> specified Feb  4 10:04:20 ghostwheel boinc[13404]: No protocol 
>> specified
> 
>> -- Package-specific info: -- Contents of 
>> /etc/default/boinc-client: # This file is 
>> /etc/default/boinc-client, it is a configuration file for the # 
>> /etc/init.d/boinc-client init script.
> 
>> # Set this to 1 to enable and to 0 to disable the init script. 
>> ENABLED="1"
> 
>> # Set this to 1 to enable advanced scheduling of the BOINC core 
>> client and # all its sub-processes (reduces the impact of BOINC
>> on the system's # performance). SCHEDULE="1"
> 
>> # The BOINC core client will be started with the permissions of 
>> this user. BOINC_USER="boinc"
> 
>> # This is the data directory of the BOINC core client. 
>> BOINC_DIR="/var/lib/boinc-client"
> 
>> # This is the location of the BOINC core client, that the init 
>> script uses. # If you do not want to use the client program 
>> provided by the boinc-client # package, you can specify here an 
>> alternative client program. #BOINC_CLIENT="/usr/local/bin/boinc"
>>  BOINC_CLIENT="/usr/bin/boinc"
> 
>> # Here you can specify additional options to pass to the BOINC
>> core client. # Type 'boinc --help' or 'man boinc' for a full
>> summary of allowed options. #BOINC_OPTS="--allow_remote_gui_rpc"
>>  BOINC_OPTS=""
> 
>> # Scheduling options
> 
>> # Set SCHEDULE="0" if prefering to run with upstream default 
>> priority # settings.
> 
>> # Nice levels. When systems are truly busy, e.g. because of too 
>> many active # scientific applications started by the boinc
>> client, there is a chance for # the boinc client not to be
>> granted sufficient opportunity to check for # scientific
>> applications to be alive and make the (wrong) decision to #
>> terminate the scientific app. This is particularly an issue with
>> many # apps started in parallel on modern multi-core systems and
>> extra overheads # for the download and uploads of files with the
>> project servers. Another # concern is the latency for scientific
>> applications to communicate with the # graphics card, which
>> should be low. All such values should be set and # controled from
>> within the BOINC client. The Debian init script also sets # extra
>> constrains via chrt on real time performance and via ionice on #
>> I/O performance, which is beyond the regular BOINC client. It
>> then was # too easy to use that code to also constrain minimal
>> nice levels. We still # think about how to best distinguish GPU
>> applications from regular apps. BOINC_NICE_CLIENT=10
>> BOINC_NICE_APP_DEFAULT=19 #BOINC_NICE_APP_GPU=5        # not yet
>> used
> 
>> # ionice classes. See manpage of ionice (1) in the util-linux 
>> package. BOINC_IONICE_CLIENT=3        # idle 
>> #BOINC_IONICE_APP_DEFAULT=3  # idle, not yet used 
>> #BOINC_IONICE_APP_GPU=2      # best effort, not yet used
> 
> 
>> -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers 
>> testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (300, 
>> 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: 
>> i386
> 
>> Kernel: Linux 4.3.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: 
>> LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: 
>> /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via 
>> /run/systemd/system)
> 
>> Versions of packages boinc-client depends on: ii  adduser 
>> 3.113+nmu3 ii  ca-certificates         20160104 ii  cdebconf 
>> [debconf-2.0]  0.201 ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]   1.5.58 ii 
>> init-system-helpers     1.24 ii  libboinc7 7.6.22+dfsg-3 ii
>> libc6                   2.21-7 ii  libcurl3 7.47.0-1 ii  libgcc1
>> 1:5.3.1-7 ii  libstdc++6 5.3.1-7 ii  libx11-6
>> 2:1.6.3-1 ii  libxss1 1:1.2.2-1 pn  python:any
>> <none> ii  zlib1g 1:1.2.8.dfsg-2+b1
> 
>> boinc-client recommends no packages.
> 
>> Versions of packages boinc-client suggests: pn
>> boinc-client-fglrx <none> pn  boinc-client-nvidia-cuda  <none> pn
>> boinc-client-opencl <none> ii  boinc-manager
>> 7.6.22+dfsg-3 ii x11-xserver-utils         7.7+5
> 
>> -- Configuration Files:
>> /etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml changed:
>> <global_preferences> <run_on_batteries>0</run_on_batteries> 
>> <run_if_user_active>0</run_if_user_active> 
>> <idle_time_to_run>10.000000</idle_time_to_run> 
>> <start_hour>0.000000</start_hour> <end_hour>0.000000</end_hour> 
>> <net_start_hour>0.000000</net_start_hour> 
>> <net_end_hour>0.000000</net_end_hour> 
>> <disk_max_used_gb>10.000000</disk_max_used_gb> 
>> <cpu_usage_limit>60.000000</cpu_usage_limit>
>> </global_preferences>
> 
>> /etc/boinc-client/gui_rpc_auth.cfg [Errno 13] Permission denied: 
>> u'/etc/boinc-client/gui_rpc_auth.cfg'
> 
>> -- debconf information: boinc-client/remove_boinc_dir: true
> 
> 
> 

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