Hi,
The discussion in <URL: https://bugs.debian.org/890517 > reminded me of why we introduced the killer package in Debian Edu. The problem was that some user programs refused to die when the user logged out, and instead went cracy when $DISPLAY no longer worked. If I remember correctly, it was typically libreoffice or firefox, and these left behind processes would soon consume a lot of (or all) CPU and memory on the machine, making the machine unusable for the next user. We came up with the approach to add a background process to check regulary for left behind processes (aka user processes for no longer logged in users), and kill them to get rid of the problem. It would ignore niced processes, in the believe that left behind niced processes were left intentionally behind and should be allowed to run. A better approach would be to run a script when the user logged out, and kill any stray processes at that point instead. Unfortunately there were no hooks available to do this. Now, there is a hook to do so, in /etc/X11/Xreset.d/. Perhaps it is time to add a script in there and retire the killer package? Note, this is not to be taken as an argument to not fix x2go, which really need to register its sessions in utmp/wtmp. -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen
