On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, maximum entropy wrote:

> >Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 20:05:15 -0800 (PST)
> >From: Bill Studenmund <skippy@macro.Stanford.EDU>
> >
> >On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, maximum entropy wrote:
> >> 
> >> I believe you're also mistaken here, unless something has changed
> >> in the past year to make this necessary.  The only pmax of mine that
> >> uses xdm is running 1.3.0 and works just fine with the console enabled
> >> in /etc/ttys.
> >
> >You're lucky! If you have the getty enabled on the tty at the same time as
> >xdm, you get into race conditions. Whichever of the two opens the console
> >first wins. I had such a problem w/ an ultrix box once. You log in via
> >xdm, do things, logout, and get a command line prompt! Ick!
> 
> Can you actually reproduce this problem on NetBSD/pmax, or are you
> guessing?
> 
> Looking at the /etc/rc script, I see that xdm is not started
> asynchronously.  If it so happens that xdm opens the console before
> daemonizing itself, it's going to win the race every time.  If the
> correct process is guaranteed to win the race every time, it isn't a
> race condition.
> 
> Additionally, xdm does not exit when you log out of the X session, so
> the "race" would stay won even after logging out.
> 
> I don't have an xsrc tree handy to verify my guess as to how this
> works.  But I do have reason to believe that it does work, and I don't
> think I'm just lucky.
> 

I've seen problems (though not on my pmax, but I have the console off in
/etc/ttys) with various machines when the console is enabled in /etc/ttys
and xdm is going.

-Dan