Fixing SLiM

Having been using my version of SLiM as a desktop login manager for a few days, I had seen a couple of spontaneous logouts.

After minimal investigation, this was a trivial configuration error on my part. And, fortunately, easy to fix.

The slim process is managed by SMF. This ensures that it starts at boot (at the right time, I've written it so that it's dependent on the console-login service, so it launches immediately the CLI login is ready) and that it gets restarted if it exits for whatever reason.

So I had seen myself being logged out on a couple of different occasions. Once when exiting a VNC session (as another user, no less); another whilst running a configure script.

A quick look at the SMF log file, in /var/svc/log/system-slim:default.log, gives an immediate hint:

[ Sep  5 13:37:17 Stopping because process dumped core. ]

So, a process in the slim process contract - which is all processes launched from the desktop - dumped core, SMF spotted it happening, and restarted the whole desktop session. You really don't want that, especially as as a desktop session can be comprised of essentially arbitrary applications, and random core dumps are not entirely unexpected.

So, the fix is a standard one, which I had forgotten entirely. Just add the following snippet to the SMF manifest:

<property_group name='startd' type='framework'>
     <!-- sub-process core dumps shouldn't restart session -->
     <propval name='ignore_error' type='astring'
         value='core,signal' />
</property_group>

and everything is much better behaved.