unexec'd graphics program crashes

[Eric L. Raible]

Perhaps someone can help me out on this one:

I've got a program, let's call it X, which might or might not do some
graphics.  It has the cabability to unexec itself (a la gnu emacs).

Suppose I run X, then unexec it to create file Y.  X does no graphics
before doing the unexec.

The problem is that Y is then unable to do a winopen.  There are two
distinct ways in which it fails:

1) It terminates "normally" (according to dbx).
2) It gets stuck in a wait state (according to ps), and cannot be
   killed.  In fact, any other process that touches it (i.e. rm Y)
   also gets hung, and eventually NeWS gets hung.  This means a reboot.

In case (2), it seems as if the process is waiting for some resource
which never becomes available.

My guess is that the running X and the kernel have some shared state.
When Y is started up, there is some inconsistency which causes it to
wait forever.

I'd really appreciate some help on this one...

- Eric (raible at orville.nas.nasa.gov)