Problem with Xming

[Matt Brown]

Hi,

Sorry for the vague question but my understanding of what is happening is vague! 🙁

We use VisualGDB to build on Nvidia Jetson boards. During normal development we use Visual Studio/VisualGDB in interactive mode, this is fine.  We don’t very often attempt to run within in Visual Studio/VisualGDB, we’re just using it as a build system.

We also do builds on the command line by running Visual Studio with ‘/build Release|Jetson’ (for example).  This is how we do builds using Jenkins.

We’ve recently started having problems with our command line builds and we think it is related to Xming.  We don’t understand what changed to cause the problem.  We don’t think it was as a result of updating VisualGDB.  It may have started after updating Visual Studio!  It may have started after updating the target OS!

I have 2 similar targets, both are Ubuntu 18.04 but one has desktop packages installed and is fully up to date with all the Ubuntu updates, the other has over 400 pending updates.  Ubuntu 18.04.06 vs 18.04.05.

I can use the VisualGDB Shared Folder Manager to mount and unmount the shared folder on 18.04.05 without reference to Xming.  If I do the same thing on Ubuntu 18.04.06, VisualGDB attempts to run Xming when I click Unmount.  If the Xming path is incorrect I see the ‘Missing X Server for Windows’ dialogue.  We think VisualGDB is attempting to run Xming during the command line build but only for Ubuntu 18.04.06.

We did try disabling ‘Forward to Windows machines (via Xming)’ and it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Any idea why this behaviour seems to be different between the 2 targets?

Any idea how we can remove all dependencies on Xming?

Thanks,

Matt

VisualGDB version 5.6R8 (build 4702)

MS Visual Studio Pro 2019 Version 16.11.22

[support]

Thanks for confirming your license information.

VisualGDB displays the XMing GUI whenever any program running on the Linux side tries to connect to the X11 server in order to display the X11 GUI via SSH. Normally, it happens when explicitly running graphical Linux applications. Sometimes, the command-line tools try connecting to the X11 server as a part of initializing some libraries, that also triggers this GUI.

If you would like to find the root cause, you can try enumerating the processes on the Linux machine while the VisualGDB XMing prompt is still active, attaching to the suspect ones and checking the call stack. It should explain which process is trying to connect to X11.

A more universal solution would be to completely disable X11 forwarding for that host via Tools->VisualGDB->SSH Host Manager->Host-wide settings->X11 forwarding = Disabled.

[Matt Brown]

A more universal solution would be to completely disable X11 forwarding for that host via Tools->VisualGDB->SSH Host Manager->Host-wide settings->X11 forwarding = Disabled.

This works for us as we don’t use X forward very often.

Our Jenkins builds are back online. 🙂

Thanks,

Matt

[support]

No problem, and good to know it worked.

[Author]

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