Comment 97 for bug 544139

I think I have some good news...

I first tried Lennie's PPA, but without patches #5, #6 and #7 (IOW, only patch #8). I'm actually not exactly sure what patches were applied, because the "skipping :%d" messages were still there. But the message of patch #7 was not there any more, which is the important thing (see #88).

Without that message, the bug reappeared after about 20 reboots and consolekit went through the retry-loop. However, the delay in the retry loop being very small (200usec), the loop did not have any effect: all 30 retries failed.

After much messing with the patches, I restarted with a clean source tgz and applied the patch 08 ONLY. I'm sure this time, 'cause I applied the patch manually on the sources (!). I also changed the usleep time to 200000 (0.2sec). After a few reboots the bug did not reappear, so I checked the log... only to see that the loop was working! In fact, the bug was triggered more often now that no extra debug messages were printed. But every time the loop fixed the problem. Banzai!

Interestingly, only 2 retries were necessary (which means a 0.2 second delay). Hence the characteristic time on which the bug occurs is [ 6ms < t < 200ms ]. Here's the log, which is now very compact:

Aug 31 12:52:48 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[954]: WARNING: Could not determine active console
Aug 31 12:52:48 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[954]: WARNING: console_fd: 3
Aug 31 12:52:48 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[954]: WARNING: tried but failed
Aug 31 12:52:49 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[954]: WARNING: console_fd: 12
Aug 31 12:52:49 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[954]: WARNING: did not fail ? after 2 attempts
Aug 31 13:01:49 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[864]: WARNING: Could not determine active console
Aug 31 13:01:49 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[864]: WARNING: console_fd: 3
Aug 31 13:01:49 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[864]: WARNING: tried but failed
Aug 31 13:01:50 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[864]: WARNING: console_fd: 12
Aug 31 13:01:50 tacto-ppp-01 console-kit-daemon[864]: WARNING: did not fail ? after 2 attempts

If I'm not mistaken no warnings are printed at all when consolekit works well, and only a few lines are printed when the retry loop saves the day.

Lennie, could you make a nice&clean PPA with your patch #08 only (and change the usleep delay to 0.2sec)? I'm afraid my packaging skills are not exactly good enough for everyone to play with my debs.