XMonad does not respond to keyboard input when there is a lot of I/O occuring in a terminal

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. cat /dev/urandom in a terminal emulator (I'm using 'terminator')

2. CPU usage is only around 20% however xmonad is completey unresponsive to 
mouse or keyboard input. It usually takes a while to gain control again.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Xmonad would handle this gracefully.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

Xmonad 0.10 and Debian Linux, kernel 2.36 liquorix

Are you using an xmonad.hs?  Please attach it and the output of "xmonad
--recompile".

Please provide any additional information below.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by cmcbr...@rjmetrics.com on 1 Sep 2011 at 6:31

Attachments:

• xmonad.hs

[GoogleCodeExporter]

For what it's worth, I've never observed this and I'm pretty good at stressing 
X11 and xmonad this way.

That said:  Terminator is mostly in Java, and Java's known to play badly with 
xmonad and non-reparenting window managers in general; the setWMName call works 
for some but not all JDKs, and there appear to still be some oddnesses around 
the latest JDKs with xmonad.

Original comment by allber...@gmail.com on 1 Sep 2011 at 10:25

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Just for clarification I use the terminator thats written in python. 
https://launchpad.net/terminator

I realized as I was writing this the possibility that this could be caused by 
using the liquorix kernel, since that uses a non-standard I/O scheduler (BFQ). 
When I get a chance I'll try to reproduce this on a stock kernel.

Original comment by cmcbr...@rjmetrics.com on 1 Sep 2011 at 10:35

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I can't reproduce this on vanilla or zen (BFQ/liquorix) kernels, using xterm, 
gnome-terminal, rxvt-unicode, or konsole. That said; I've only got 2.6.38 and 
39 kernels available. If I get a chance I'll try with terminator, and try a 
2.6.36 zen (liquorix) kernel. I use pretty much default zen kernel settings, 
which AFAIK is what liquorix uses, although it also builds many modules. So I'm 
doubting the kernel is the problem.

What sort of hardware are you testing on, cmcbr...?

Original comment by wirtwo...@gmail.com on 5 Sep 2011 at 12:07

• Added labels: Usability

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I tried this with gnome-terminal and it happened again. I have 8gbs of ram. 
Quad-core intel Core(TM) i5 CPU@ 3.33GHz

Original comment by cmcbr...@rjmetrics.com on 6 Sep 2011 at 6:57