Hi folks.

I’m running into an issue when forking images with OSProcess in headless images. In older versions of OSProcess #forkSqueak would try to fork in any case, independent of the presence of or the connection state to XDisplayControlPlugin.
In dtl.57 #forkSqueak was changed to explicitly check if XDisplayControlPlugin is present and can be controlled. This is obviously a good thing for when the image runs headful. In my case however I can no longer fork my headless image, even though I don’t need an X session.

Important: apparently #safeToForkSqueak answers true if the XDisplayControlPlugin is available, even in a headless image. But since we don’t need windows, we don’t install X libraries on our server and so #safeToForkSqueak answers false. So the whole thing boils down to a situation where Squeak / Pharo is run in an environment where the XDisplayPlugin can’t be loaded but where forking is still possible.

I don’t know how to do this in a cross platform way but for Pharo we could extend #safeToForkSqueak with a headless check like this:

safeToForkSqueak
	"The forkSqueak method is currently supported only for X11 displays with
	XDisplayControlPlugin available. If the plugin is not available, the child Squeak
	VM will continue interacting with the X display, which leads to errors in the
	parent Squeak, including VM crashes."

	^self canControlXDisplay
		or: [ Smalltalk isHeadless ]


I’m going to dirty patch this for my images because I really need it but I think some version of this patch would be a good thing to integrate into OSProcess.

Cheers,
Max