Bug 848748

Summary: crash if I interact with empathy - no one specific action causes the crash
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 13.1 Reporter: fire bird <firebird209>
Component: X.OrgAssignee: E-mail List <xorg-maintainer-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED NORESPONSE QA Contact: E-mail List <xorg-maintainer-bugs>
Severity: Critical    
Priority: P3 - Medium CC: dimstar, forgotten_aK8dWmgD-F, forgotten_cvUOoXEf7z, forgotten_DV81ZEWZkN, hvogel
Version: RC 2   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86-64   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description fire bird 2013-11-01 23:20:44 UTC
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

This issue has been happening for a week or so now, in RC1 and now in a clean install of RC2 as well. I don't know what exactly is causing it, but when using empathy, not just in gnome, but in, for example, xfce as well, if I close an empathy chat window, if I interact with empathy's preferences window, such as changing the chat theme, something crashes and I wind up being brought back to gdm login. I cannot say I've found much helpful information in the logs, however one thing I did find in /var/log/gdm/:0.log.3 is:

(EE) Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault). Server aborting
(EE) 
(EE) 
Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support 
	 at http://wiki.x.org
 for help. 
(EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information.
(EE) 
(II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch
(EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.

I am not sure if this is the culprit of the crash, however, but it's about all I've been able to find thus far.

A grep of /var/log/Xorg.0.log for (EE) finds the following:

	(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
[  4746.274] (EE) 
[  4746.274] (EE) Backtrace:
[  4746.274] (EE) 0: /usr/bin/Xorg (xorg_backtrace+0x3d) [0x584cbd]
[  4746.274] (EE) 1: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x188a29) [0x588a29]
[  4746.274] (EE) 2: /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x7fc4f1fee000+0xf9f0) [0x7fc4f1ffd9f0]
[  4746.274] (EE) 3: /usr/bin/Xorg (FreeGC+0x16) [0x44ecb6]
[  4746.274] (EE) 4: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x5e6a2) [0x45e6a2]
[  4746.274] (EE) 5: /usr/bin/Xorg (FreeResource+0xa1) [0x45f131]
[  4746.274] (EE) 6: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x38e6a) [0x438e6a]
[  4746.275] (EE) 7: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x3cade) [0x43cade]
[  4746.275] (EE) 8: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x2c05a) [0x42c05a]
[  4746.275] (EE) 9: /lib64/libc.so.6 (__libc_start_main+0xf5) [0x7fc4f0e61be5]
[  4746.275] (EE) 10: /usr/bin/Xorg (0x400000+0x2c3a1) [0x42c3a1]
[  4746.275] (EE) 
[  4746.275] (EE) Segmentation fault at address 0x28
[  4746.275] (EE) 
[  4746.275] (EE) Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault). Server aborting
[  4746.275] (EE) 
[  4746.275] (EE) 
[  4746.275] (EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information.
[  4746.275] (EE) 
[  4746.333] (EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.

The crash happens every single time when closing a chat window, however doesn't always happen when interacting with the preferences window.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open empathy
2. Chat with someone and close the chat window (with the X in the top right corner) or interact with the Preferences window.
3. The crash will occur (every time when closing the chat window) or sometimes when interacting with the Preferences window.
Actual Results:  
The actual result is that when using empathy and closing a chat window, a crash occurs every time, and occurs sporadically when interacting with the Preferences window.

Expected Results:  
The expected result would be, when using empathy, for a crash not to occur at all, and instead for it to be a stable chat application.

This issue occurs on both RC1 and now a clean / fresh install of RC2. I am using the default gnome adwaita theme, default icon set, and so forth, nothing is modified from the default except for my font choice in gnome-tweak-tool of bumping Cantrell up to 12 from 11 and choosing the Monospace font of DejaVu Sans Mono.
Comment 1 Dominique Leuenberger 2013-11-02 12:09:19 UTC
The crash seems to be in X itself.

CCing sndirsch, who might have some insight alreeady.

Fire Bird: can you get a full stack trace of this crash? Likely by configuring your system to create core dumps in a spec. location (I use /cores; world-writable and /cores/%e-%t-%u.core in /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
Comment 2 fire bird 2013-11-04 19:46:58 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)
> The crash seems to be in X itself.
> 
> CCing sndirsch, who might have some insight alreeady.
> 
> Fire Bird: can you get a full stack trace of this crash? Likely by configuring
> your system to create core dumps in a spec. location (I use /cores;
> world-writable and /cores/%e-%t-%u.core in /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern

Hi Dominique,

I have a .core file generated (thanks for your help on how to do that) but I cannot attach it here as I'm told it exceeds 10MB in size. I was playing around some more with this last night (November 3, 2013) and it seems the issue could be stemming from the Adwaita theme.... I had been customizing things a bit the other day and switched to a Zukitwo theme (gnome shell, window decorations, gtk, etc.) and empathy worked quite well, it didn't crash or have the same behavior as with Adwaita, so, I then switched things back to Adwaita, restarted empathy, and the crash occurred again.... I'm not sure how to track a theme bug down, but just throwing that out there as some new information I've discovered with regards to this bug.
Comment 3 Forgotten User aK8dWmgD-F 2013-11-05 00:48:13 UTC
I'd like to say that I'm experiencing the same bug on openSUSE 13.1.
fire bird, can't you host the core dump at an external website? Maybe Dropbox or something? If not, I'll gladly try to generate a core dump myself.
Comment 4 Forgotten User aK8dWmgD-F 2013-11-05 02:18:18 UTC
I believe that I have pinpointed the source of the problem. It has to do with the Intel driver. Both I and firebird (I spoke with him on IRC) are using Intel GPUs. The current version of the driver defaults to the newer SNA acceleration. This acceleration is still a little big buggy, e.g., it introduces some artifacts on Firefox: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=168823 I experienced these artifacts while using an Arch Linux install a few days ago, and they are also present on openSUSE. However, since they do not occur very often and kept everything as it was.

Due to this empathy bug I started I thought that if X11 crashes it may well be caused by a driver problem. So I decided to override the default SNA and switch to UXA. And this change fixed the problem. Moreover, firebird also said to me that he has another computer with an NVIDIA GPU that doesn't present this issue.

After some close inspection, it seems that openSUSE 13.1 is currently using a pre-release of the future 3.0 version of xf86-video-intel. The current version was released 10 days ago (https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/openSUSE:13.1/xf86-video-intel/xf86-video-intel.changes?expand=1). This version is actually newer than the one used by Arch Linux (https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xf86-video-intel/) and was made available "about a week ago" as firebird mentioned on his initial report.

All of this indicates that the problem is related to the x86-video-intel driver, especially when using the default SNA mode. Also, considering that the problem seems the be confined to GNOME when using the Adwaita theme (according to what firebird said), it may be the case that Adwaita uses some function at the GPU level that causes the crash, where some other GTK themes do not.

So, it seems that the bug manifests itself when using xf86-video-intel (SNA mode) + Adwaita. If the problem only happens with Adwaita, it may be fixed by patching it. But patching/downgrading xf86-video-intel seems to be a more future proof solution (since whatever Adwaita is doing "kind of wrong" can in fact be made by some other untested GTK theme/application combo that may crash X11, which is something really critical.
Comment 5 Dominique Leuenberger 2013-11-06 21:37:03 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> I have a .core file generated (thanks for your help on how to do that) but I
> cannot attach it here as I'm told it exceeds 10MB in size. I was playing around
> some more with this last night (November 3, 2013) and it seems the issue could
> be stemming from the Adwaita theme.... I had been customizing things a bit the
> other day and switched to a Zukitwo theme (gnome shell, window decorations,
> gtk, etc.) and empathy worked quite well, it didn't crash or have the same
> behavior as with Adwaita, so, I then switched things back to Adwaita, restarted
> empathy, and the crash occurred again.... I'm not sure how to track a theme bug
> down, but just throwing that out there as some new information I've discovered
> with regards to this bug.

Uploading the .core file would not help.. what we need is a stack trace.

using gdb, you can load the core file as 'reference' and do a stack trace based on that crash (instead of trying to reproduce the crash while running gdb).

Anyway.. intel driver seems to be a good  pointer already... (the initial crash did show it being in X after all.. not gnome).

changing component to Xorg for now..
Comment 6 Hendrik Vogelsang 2013-11-19 12:32:06 UTC
Wrote http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Switch_xf86-video-intel_to_UXA
Comment 7 Forgotten User cvUOoXEf7z 2013-11-24 17:36:03 UTC
I have pretty much the same problem.
Comment 8 Forgotten User DV81ZEWZkN 2013-11-24 19:07:29 UTC
Please cross check with bug 847941 & bug 847762 (especially whether the newer version resolves the problem)
Comment 9 Stefan Dirsch 2014-01-31 14:09:52 UTC
Still anyone of the affected users available? Otherwise better close this bug ...
Comment 10 Forgotten User cvUOoXEf7z 2014-03-26 13:07:54 UTC
I don't use Empathy anymore, so i'm not sure. Anyway, not for me.
Comment 11 Stefan Dirsch 2014-04-24 11:13:30 UTC
Seems we no longer can expect a response here ...