Here's the problem as described by a collegue. --David Hollingsworth ---------- We have a large, multithreaded program where each thread opens a separate X11 Display. We do not need per-Display locking, but we call XInitThreads on startup to avoid corruption of certain global X11 data structures. Unfortunately, we still see occasional hangs in the Xft library. The problem is that Xft maintains the global linked list '_XftDisplayInfo', but always manipulates it without a lock in xftdpy.c. Not only does opening or closing a display manipulate the list, but _XftDisplayInfoGet does an "MRU" operation to move an element to the front of the list, so for a program like ours the race condition can strike during numerous different Xft operations. The bottom line is that we get occasional corruption of this linked list where it becomes circular, causing the next thread who uses it to spin forever. _XftDisplayInfo (and similar global data structures, if any) needs to be protected with a mutex. For performance reasons it would obviously be ideal, as in other X11 code, for locking to be a no-op unless XInitThreads had been called. If tying into XInitThreads is difficult for some reason, there needs to at least be a special Xft proc that enables locking analogously to XInitThreads. Thanks! -Mat ----------
