Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-04-16 Thread Mark Lillibridge

  On 08/04/2010 04:47, Mark Lillibridge wrote:
   Can you pull this patch and include it in the next X server release, 
 please.
  
Excellent.  Thank you.  Do we need to do anything special for this
   to get picked up for Xming as well?
  
  Assuming I don't receive too much hatemail about this breaking stuff after 
 the 
  next X server release, I'll push it upstream to X.Org.

Thanks!  Any idea when the next X server release is?

- Mark

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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-04-13 Thread Jon TURNEY

On 08/04/2010 04:47, Mark Lillibridge wrote:

Can you pull this patch and include it in the next X server release, please.


 Excellent.  Thank you.  Do we need to do anything special for this
to get picked up for Xming as well?


Assuming I don't receive too much hatemail about this breaking stuff after the 
next X server release, I'll push it upstream to X.Org.


Colin Harrison, the Xming maintainer, periodically syncs from X.Org, but it's 
his decision what he includes.


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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-04-07 Thread Mark Lillibridge

Jon wrote:
 Yaakov,
 
 Can you pull this patch and include it in the next X server release, please.

Excellent.  Thank you.  Do we need to do anything special for this
to get picked up for Xming as well?

- Mark

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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-03-29 Thread Jon TURNEY

On 20/03/2010 16:32, Mark Lillibridge wrote:

On February 23, 2010, Jon Turney wrote:

On 13/02/2010 20:24, Mark Lillibridge wrote:

Jon wrote:

   Thanks for the patch.  Have you actually tested that this resolves your 
problem?


  Yes.  Of course, really, really large bursts will still fail, but
they should be very rare.



Perhaps you might try the attached patch, instead, and see if that helps.


 Yes, your (previously) attached patch seems to solve the problem
without wasting memory or only working for a finite number of keys.
Nice job.  What's the next step towards getting this patch added to the
source/sent upstream/to Xming?


Yaakov,

Can you pull this patch and include it in the next X server release, please.

Sadly this isn't quite a complete solution: there's still the problem in 
multiwindow mode that Windows uses a modal loop when resizing/moving a window, 
so the X server code gets no chance to do anything then.  You can easily 
demonstrate this by resizing the frame of an X window, moving the mouse 
continuously for a number of seconds, and then notice that X window doesn't 
react to the queued size changes until the mouse button is released.



The following changes since commit 579715f830fbbca9e1ecb17dc18176132f5969e7:
  Rami Ylimaki (1):
os: Prevent backtrace from being stopped in noreturn functions.

are available in the git repository at:

  git://anongit.freedesktop.org/~jturney/xserver for-yaakov

Jon TURNEY (1):
  Cygwin/X: Process one Windows message per wakeup, rather than all of them.

 hw/xwin/winblock.c  |   23 ---
 hw/xwin/winwakeup.c |4 ++--
 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 21 deletions(-)



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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-03-20 Thread Mark Lillibridge

On February 23, 2010, Jon Turney wrote:
 On 13/02/2010 20:24, Mark Lillibridge wrote:
  Jon wrote:
Thanks for the patch.  Have you actually tested that this resolves your 
  problem?
 
   Yes.  Of course, really, really large bursts will still fail, but
  they should be very rare.
 
 
 Perhaps you might try the attached patch, instead, and see if that helps.

Yes, your (previously) attached patch seems to solve the problem
without wasting memory or only working for a finite number of keys.
Nice job.  What's the next step towards getting this patch added to the
source/sent upstream/to Xming?

- Thanks,
  Mark

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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-02-23 Thread Jon TURNEY

On 13/02/2010 20:24, Mark Lillibridge wrote:

Jon wrote:

  Thanks for the patch.  Have you actually tested that this resolves your 
problem?


 Yes.  Of course, really, really large bursts will still fail, but
they should be very rare.



Perhaps you might try the attached patch, instead, and see if that helps.




  On 23/01/2010 22:02, Mark Lillibridge wrote:
 I am not a Windows programmer.  Can someone tell me if it's okay for
winWindowProc to block?  In particular, could we make it block until the
mieq queue is not full?

  I think blocking would just result in a deadlock, as the X server is only
  single-threaded.  The windows message pump is called when the server has no
  other work to do.

  This should be documented in [1], although perhaps that is lacking in detail.

I notice that winWakeHandler()/winBlockHandler() try to completely empty the
windows message queue, which leads to this problem as the server won't get a
chance to process anything (draining the mieq queue) until they return.

It might be enough to resolve this problem to allow those functions to
complete after processing a limited number of events (chosen so as to not
overflow the mieq queue), or if they notice that the event queue has crossed
some high-water mark threshold.


 This is an interesting idea; I spent a while looking at
WaitFor.c/WaitForSomething, but it's pretty opaque -- couldn't figure
out when/under what conditions winWakeHandler is called by it.  E.g.,
what's the actual priority between emptying the queue and processing
window messages?


Let's see: right at the end of hw/xwin/InitInput.c we open /dev/windows (a 
special device which becomes ready when there is anything on the windows 
message queue) and add that to the select mask.  When the select returns, all 
the wakeup handlers are run, including winWakeHandler() which checks the WM 
message queue.


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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-02-13 Thread Mark Lillibridge

Jon wrote:
  Thanks for the patch.  Have you actually tested that this resolves your 
 problem?

Yes.  Of course, really, really large bursts will still fail, but
they should be very rare.


  I'll add some words about contributing patches to the CG guide 
 documentation, 
  thanks for pointing out this oversight.
  
  Perhaps that's the reason we hardly ever get any :-)

You think?  :-)



  On 23/01/2010 22:02, Mark Lillibridge wrote:
I am not a Windows programmer.  Can someone tell me if it's okay for
   winWindowProc to block?  In particular, could we make it block until the
   mieq queue is not full?
  
  I think blocking would just result in a deadlock, as the X server is only 
  single-threaded.  The windows message pump is called when the server has no 
  other work to do.
  
  This should be documented in [1], although perhaps that is lacking in detail.
  
 I notice that winWakeHandler()/winBlockHandler() try to completely empty the 
 windows message queue, which leads to this problem as the server won't get a 
 chance to process anything (draining the mieq queue) until they return.
 
 It might be enough to resolve this problem to allow those functions to 
 complete after processing a limited number of events (chosen so as to not 
 overflow the mieq queue), or if they notice that the event queue has crossed 
 some high-water mark threshold.

This is an interesting idea; I spent a while looking at
WaitFor.c/WaitForSomething, but it's pretty opaque -- couldn't figure
out when/under what conditions winWakeHandler is called by it.  E.g.,
what's the actual priority between emptying the queue and processing
window messages?

- Mark

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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-02-08 Thread Jon TURNEY

On 12/01/2010 18:44, Mark Lillibridge wrote:
 Background:

  I use Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software
 to control remote Linux systems from a Windows box.  I open up xterms
 and emacs windows on a local Cygwin X server.  Occasionally the voice
 recognizer makes a mistake, which has to be corrected.  The mechanics of
 how this is done are unimportant; what matters is how Dragon applies the
 correction.  It does this by sending a large burst of keystrokes via
 something like SendKeys.  (E.g., many (shift) arrow keys to select the
 text to be changed, a backspace to delete it, then the replacement
 text.)

  Unfortunately, there is a bug in the current released Cygwin X
 server that causes it to drop sent keystrokes when the burst exceeds a
 given size (roughly 64 or 128 keys depending on the version).  This
 breaks correction, and forces painful manual fix up of the text.  Note
 that what is really dropped are key events so the system can get into
 the state where the shift key remains pressed or a key starts repeating
 forever because the key up event was dropped.
[repro snipped]

Mark,

Thanks for the detailed bug report and clear reproduction steps.

On 23/01/2010 22:02, Mark Lillibridge wrote:

 I am not a Windows programmer.  Can someone tell me if it's okay for
winWindowProc to block?  In particular, could we make it block until the
mieq queue is not full?


I think blocking would just result in a deadlock, as the X server is only 
single-threaded.  The windows message pump is called when the server has no 
other work to do.


This should be documented in [1], although perhaps that is lacking in detail.

I notice that winWakeHandler()/winBlockHandler() try to completely empty the 
windows message queue, which leads to this problem as the server won't get a 
chance to process anything (draining the mieq queue) until they return.


It might be enough to resolve this problem to allow those functions to 
complete after processing a limited number of events (chosen so as to not 
overflow the mieq queue), or if they notice that the event queue has crossed 
some high-water mark threshold.



On 05/02/2010 00:45, Mark Lillibridge wrote:
  Given there doesn't seem to be anyone competent enough to attempt a
 more ambitious patch, I think we should apply the temporary patch.  How
 should we/I. go about doing this?  The Cygwin X website and contributors
 documentation doesn't actually say how to do this.

 The patch is enclosed at the end.

 - Thanks,
Mark


 $ diff -u mieq.c~ mieq.c
 --- mieq.c~ 2009-10-15 21:38:27.0 -0700
 +++ mieq.c  2010-02-04 16:42:30.773405200 -0800
 @@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
   # includeX11/extensions/dpmsconst.h
   #endif

 -#define QUEUE_SIZE  512
 +#define QUEUE_SIZE  25000

   #define EnqueueScreen(dev) dev-spriteInfo-sprite-pEnqueueScreen
   #define DequeueScreen(dev) dev-spriteInfo-sprite-pDequeueScreen


Thanks for the patch.  Have you actually tested that this resolves your problem?

I'll add some words about contributing patches to the CG guide documentation, 
thanks for pointing out this oversight.


Perhaps that's the reason we hardly ever get any :-)

[1] 
http://x.cygwin.com/docs/cg/prog-server-architecture.html#prog-server-architecture-input


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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-02-04 Thread Mark Lillibridge

Given there doesn't seem to be anyone competent enough to attempt a
more ambitious patch, I think we should apply the temporary patch.  How
should we/I. go about doing this?  The Cygwin X website and contributors
documentation doesn't actually say how to do this.

   The patch is enclosed at the end.

- Thanks,
  Mark


$ diff -u mieq.c~ mieq.c
--- mieq.c~ 2009-10-15 21:38:27.0 -0700
+++ mieq.c  2010-02-04 16:42:30.773405200 -0800
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
 # include X11/extensions/dpmsconst.h
 #endif
 
-#define QUEUE_SIZE  512
+#define QUEUE_SIZE  25000
 
 #define EnqueueScreen(dev) dev-spriteInfo-sprite-pEnqueueScreen
 #define DequeueScreen(dev) dev-spriteInfo-sprite-pDequeueScreen


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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-01-31 Thread Mark Lillibridge

I've done a bit more investigating.

It appears that winWindowProc can block at the cost of preventing
processing of any Windows messages until it returns.  Does anyone know
how fast the mieq queue drains?  If this isn't very fast, then having
winWindowProc block waiting for the mieq queue is probably a bad idea.


There are a number of comments in mieq.c that may shed light on why
the queue is statically allocated:

mieq.c:76:
EventRec events[QUEUE_SIZE]; /* static allocation for signals */

mieq.c:138:
/*
 * Must be reentrant with ProcessInputEvents.  Assumption: mieqEnqueue
 * will never be interrupted.  If this is called from both signal
 * handlers and regular code, make sure the signal is suspended when
 * called from regular code.
 */

void
mieqEnqueue(DeviceIntPtr pDev, InternalEvent *e)


Does anyone understand this?  Does this bar dynamically allocating the
queue?  The queue does not appear to use locking unless XQUARTZ is
defined.  Does anyone know what conditions that is defined under?

I'm beginning to think that simply patching the queue to be very large
is the best solution.

- Mark


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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-01-31 Thread Bengt-Arne Fjellner

On 2010-02-01 12:33 AM, Mark Lillibridge wrote:

I've done a bit more investigating.

 It appears that winWindowProc can block at the cost of preventing
processing of any Windows messages until it returns.  Does anyone know
how fast the mieq queue drains?  If this isn't very fast, then having
winWindowProc block waiting for the mieq queue is probably a bad idea.


 There are a number of comments in mieq.c that may shed light on why
the queue is statically allocated:

mieq.c:76:
 EventRec events[QUEUE_SIZE]; /* static allocation for signals */

mieq.c:138:
/*
  * Must be reentrant with ProcessInputEvents.  Assumption: mieqEnqueue
  * will never be interrupted.  If this is called from both signal
  * handlers and regular code, make sure the signal is suspended when
  * called from regular code.
  */

void
mieqEnqueue(DeviceIntPtr pDev, InternalEvent *e)


Does anyone understand this?  Does this bar dynamically allocating the
queue?  The queue does not appear to use locking unless XQUARTZ is
defined.  Does anyone know what conditions that is defined under?

I'm beginning to think that simply patching the queue to be very large
is the best solution.

- Mark


   

Well XQuartz is what the server is called on Mac OS X

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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-01-23 Thread Mark Lillibridge

Dennis wrote:
 Hi Mark.
 
 I am a bit new to this list, but not THAT new to programming.  If you don't
 know how many keystrokes you need to have a buffer for, then you have 2
 choices:
 
 1.  Have a ridiculously huge buffer.
 2.  Setup a dynamic array.
 
 Using a 25000 character buffer seems like overkill.  But mieq.c is probably
 reading just from the Operating Systems' keyboard buffer.
 
 You may need to write an input function to feed mieq.c and somehow link to
 it.  Sadly, that level of coding is beyond my abilities.

Option 1 would be a temporary patch.  Browsing through the source
code, keypresses/releases come one at a time in via window messages to
the following routine in hw/xwin/winwndproc.c:

/*
 * Called by winWakeupHandler
 * Processes current Windows message
 */

LRESULT CALLBACK
winWindowProc (HWND hwnd, UINT message, 
   WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
...


case WM_SYSKEYDOWN:
case WM_KEYDOWN:
  if (s_pScreenPriv == NULL || s_pScreenInfo-fIgnoreInput)
break;

  ...

  /* Translate Windows key code to X scan code */
  winTranslateKey (wParam, lParam, iScanCode);

  /* Ignore repeats for CapsLock */
  if (wParam == VK_CAPITAL)
lParam = 1;

  /* Send the key event(s) */
  for (i = 0; i  LOWORD(lParam); ++i)
winSendKeyEvent (iScanCode, TRUE);
  return 0;


winSendKeyEvent in turn lives in hw/xwin/winkeybd.c:

/*
 * Take a raw X key code and send an up or down event for it.
 *
 * Thanks to VNC for inspiration, though it is a simple function.
 */

void
winSendKeyEvent (DWORD dwKey, Bool fDown)
{
  EventListPtr events;
  int i, nevents;

  /*
   * When alt-tabing between screens we can get phantom key up messages
   * Here we only pass them through it we think we should!
   */
  if (g_winKeyState[dwKey] == FALSE  fDown == FALSE) return;

  /* Update the keyState map */
  g_winKeyState[dwKey] = fDown;

  GetEventList(events);
  nevents = GetKeyboardEvents(events, g_pwinKeyboard, fDown ? KeyPress : 
KeyRele
ase, dwKey + MIN_KEYCODE);

  for (i = 0; i  nevents; i++)
mieqEnqueue(g_pwinKeyboard, events[i].event);

#if CYGDEBUG
  ErrorF(winSendKeyEvent: dwKey: %d, fDown: %d, nEvents %d\n,
  dwKey, fDown, nevents);
#endif
}


Note the call to mieqEnqueue there.  


I am not a Windows programmer.  Can someone tell me if it's okay for
winWindowProc to block?  In particular, could we make it block until the
mieq queue is not full?

- Mark



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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-01-22 Thread Mark Lillibridge

 Larry Hall wrote:
 On 01/19/2010 01:17 PM, Mark Lillibridge wrote:
  
  Hi.
  
 I don't appear to have gotten any response to my message sent to
  this list January 12 (copied below).  Do I have the right list?  Am I
  supposed to use a different mechanism to report bugs with the Cygwin X
  server?  Please help.
 
 Thanks for the information you've provided. This is the correct list for
 Cygwin X issues. I can't engage you on this topic because I'm not
 knowledgeable about the area you investigated. However, a couple of
 questions come to my mind about what you've found:
 
   1. Is this Cygwin-specific?

The Xming server, which I understand shares source code, also has
this bug.  The commercial X server, Reflection, does not have this bug.
This bug is specific to Windows implementations so I presume it does not
belong in the generic Xorg source.


   2. If not, what's the upstream solution?
 
 
 This information might help you decide if your issue is better reported
 upstream.  It may also help developers here decide how to solve the
 problem.



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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-01-19 Thread Mark Lillibridge


Hi.

  I don't appear to have gotten any response to my message sent to
this list January 12 (copied below).  Do I have the right list?  Am I
supposed to use a different mechanism to report bugs with the Cygwin X
server?  Please help.

- Thanks,
  Mark

  
  Background: 
  
  I use Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software
  to control remote Linux systems from a Windows box.  I open up xterms
  and emacs windows on a local Cygwin X server.  Occasionally the voice
  recognizer makes a mistake, which has to be corrected.  The mechanics of
  how this is done are unimportant; what matters is how Dragon applies the
  correction.  It does this by sending a large burst of keystrokes via
  something like SendKeys.  (E.g., many (shift) arrow keys to select the
  text to be changed, a backspace to delete it, then the replacement
  text.)
  
  Unfortunately, there is a bug in the current released Cygwin X
  server that causes it to drop sent keystrokes when the burst exceeds a
  given size (roughly 64 or 128 keys depending on the version).  This
  breaks correction, and forces painful manual fix up of the text.  Note
  that what is really dropped are key events so the system can get into
  the state where the shift key remains pressed or a key starts repeating
  forever because the key up event was dropped.
  
  
  Problem/temporary patch:
  
  I investigated and found that the problem appears to be that the X
  event queue (miEventQueue) in hw/mi/mieq.c is statically allocated with
  a ridiculously small value (512).  When keyboard bursts come in, this
  queue overflows, causing the problem.  If I set this queue to a more
  reasonable value of 5120:
  
  mieq.c:62:#define QUEUE_SIZE  5120/* was 512 */
  
  then 10 times larger key bursts can be accommodated without problem.
  This value is probably still too small in practice so it would be safer
  to go with a larger value like 25000.
  
  I characterize this as a temporary patch because ideally either the
  queue would be made dynamic with no upper bound in size, or some kind of
  flow control would be implemented so the code that receives Windows key
  events does not overflow the event queue.
  
  
  Reproducing the problem:
  
  Dragon NaturallySpeaking costs money, so I will instead describe how
  to demonstrate the problem using AutoHotkey, which is a free download
  from http://www.autohotkey.com/.  Download that program then create and
  run the following script, burst.ahk:
  
    cut here for burst.ahk 
  #space::
  Send ** ** ** ** 
 **{enter}** ** ** ** 
 **{enter}** ** ** ** 
 **{enter}** ** ** ** 
 **{enter}** ** ** ** **{enter}
  =
  
  Finally, type the Windows key and space together while focus is on an X
  application.  The bug is not present, the following will be typed:
  
  ** ** ** ** **
  ** ** ** ** **
  ** ** ** ** **
  ** ** ** ** **
  ** ** ** ** **
  
  
  On the other hand, if the bug is present you'll get something more like:
  
  ** ** ** ** **
  ** ** ** ** **
  *** 
  
  
  - Mark
  


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Re: bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-01-19 Thread Larry Hall (Cygwin X)

On 01/19/2010 01:17 PM, Mark Lillibridge wrote:

Hi.

   I don't appear to have gotten any response to my message sent to
this list January 12 (copied below).  Do I have the right list?  Am I
supposed to use a different mechanism to report bugs with the Cygwin X
server?  Please help.


Thanks for the information you've provided.  This is the correct list for 
Cygwin X
issues.  I can't engage you on this topic because I'm not knowledgeable 
about the

area you investigated.  However, a couple of questions come to my mind about
what you've found:

  1. Is this Cygwin-specific?
  2. If not, what's the upstream solution?

This information might help you decide if your issue is better reported 
upstream.

It may also help developers here decide how to solve the problem.

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216 Dalton Rd.  (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746

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 Q: Are you sure?
 A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
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bug report/suggested temp. patch: handling bursts of sent keys

2010-01-12 Thread Mark Lillibridge

Background: 

I use Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software
to control remote Linux systems from a Windows box.  I open up xterms
and emacs windows on a local Cygwin X server.  Occasionally the voice
recognizer makes a mistake, which has to be corrected.  The mechanics of
how this is done are unimportant; what matters is how Dragon applies the
correction.  It does this by sending a large burst of keystrokes via
something like SendKeys.  (E.g., many (shift) arrow keys to select the
text to be changed, a backspace to delete it, then the replacement
text.)

Unfortunately, there is a bug in the current released Cygwin X
server that causes it to drop sent keystrokes when the burst exceeds a
given size (roughly 64 or 128 keys depending on the version).  This
breaks correction, and forces painful manual fix up of the text.  Note
that what is really dropped are key events so the system can get into
the state where the shift key remains pressed or a key starts repeating
forever because the key up event was dropped.


Problem/temporary patch:

I investigated and found that the problem appears to be that the X
event queue (miEventQueue) in hw/mi/mieq.c is statically allocated with
a ridiculously small value (512).  When keyboard bursts come in, this
queue overflows, causing the problem.  If I set this queue to a more
reasonable value of 5120:

mieq.c:62:#define QUEUE_SIZE  5120/* was 512 */

then 10 times larger key bursts can be accommodated without problem.
This value is probably still too small in practice so it would be safer
to go with a larger value like 25000.

I characterize this as a temporary patch because ideally either the
queue would be made dynamic with no upper bound in size, or some kind of
flow control would be implemented so the code that receives Windows key
events does not overflow the event queue.


Reproducing the problem:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking costs money, so I will instead describe how
to demonstrate the problem using AutoHotkey, which is a free download
from http://www.autohotkey.com/.  Download that program then create and
run the following script, burst.ahk:

  cut here for burst.ahk 
#space::
Send ** ** ** ** 
**{enter}** ** ** ** 
**{enter}** ** ** ** 
**{enter}** ** ** ** 
**{enter}** ** ** ** **{enter}
=

Finally, type the Windows key and space together while focus is on an X
application.  The bug is not present, the following will be typed:

** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **


On the other hand, if the bug is present you'll get something more like:

** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
*** 


- Mark


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