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

[Aaron M. Ucko]

Preston Maness <aspensmonster at riseup.net> writes:

> 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.

Thanks for looking into this report, and sorry for missing your
followups.  (Copying me would have helped.)  I wound up working around
the problem for a while by holding boinc-client at the last unaffected
version, but the hard libcurl4 transition recently forced my hand,
inspiring me to take another look. ;-)

The messages did in fact turn out to be coming from X library calls
(specifically, libxcb's read_setup by way of XOpenDisplay) rather than
from BOINC itself -- that's apparently the X server's cryptic reject
message for clients it can't authenticate.  Yes, your Xsession.d hook is
in place when I'm logged in graphically, but I'm often logged in only
remotely, or logged out altogether.

I've now configured my display manager to run this hook immediately upon
launching an X server, but that's not something boinc-client can
sensibly automate: there's no universal hook directory on this front,
and at least in the case of the display manager I've been using (classic
xdm), no hook directory at all -- I had to edit a script instead.

Instead, BOINC should accommodate the possible presence of local
displays it cannot actually use.  I suppose this possibility might
interfere with the ability to assign some work to GPUs, but that
probably wouldn't be much of a loss on this particular system, which has
Intel Sandy Bridge integrated graphics. :-)

To that end, please make X_display_values_initialize (toward the end of
client/hostinfo_unix.cpp) less aggressive.  Specifically, I'd suggest
exclusively (or at least primarily) polling displays corresponding to
active utmp entries.  (At least on my system, "w" lists the display name
under FROM, which I believe corresponds to ut_host.)

Thanks!

-- 
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC (amu at alum.mit.edu, ucko at debian.org)
http://www.mit.edu/~amu/ | http://stuff.mit.edu/cgi/finger/?amu@monk.mit.edu