Comment 101 for bug 148454

I'm a computer science student (graduation next term) and have recently reviewed the consolekit code. The kernel and consolekit patches issued here are fine so far. In my opinion the only reason why this is still unfixed are the consolekit maintainers on the one hand and the problem with backports on the other hand. I realized that this bug was reported when consolekit was in v0.2.x and now it's v0.4.x since karmic I guess.

Nevertheless I'd like to mention that creating lots of (60+) threads has nearly no performance impact on a computer system with a few hundred megs of RAM and say 1 GFLOPS (todays systems have about 20-30 times as much as that). There is nothing to switch (contxt change) besides the fact that these idle threads do nothing most of the time (state: S).

The whole thing is mostly an architectural one. Some people don't like to see too manny threads listed in their favourite application or that way of console usage when it comes to the code. I can only partially agree with that since users have to thake care of their interface configuration themselves. Regarding the architectural change I agree with that but still have to emphasize the low impact on todays computers and GNU/Linux operating systems with it's modern kernels. Some people reported about consolekit wasting computing time or memory. I think this is related to different bugs either in consolekit other parts of the operating system.

Fixing it by exiting the code in within the main()-function is not an appropriate solution as well as replacing the binary isn't. You will end up possibly crashing your system with that (at least parts of the GUI). Also it is a bit difficult to apply the fixes to older versions of Ubuntu like 8.04 LTS for e.g. since a kernel patch is involved. Backports need to be tested. My personal recommendation is to do one thing about this "bug" -- nothing.