avahi-daemon crashed with SIGABRT in avahi_malloc()

[Mario Maggi]

The problem started with Ubuntu 16.10 and is still here after the upgrade to 17.04.
A warning message displays several times a day.
I click submit or cancel and nothing seems to happen.
No other problems but the message. Everything seems to work properly.

ProblemType: Crash
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.04
Package: avahi-daemon 0.6.32-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.10.0-14.16-generic 4.10.3
Uname: Linux 4.10.0-14-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.4-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CrashCounter: 1
Date: Mon Apr 3 12:26:42 2017
ExecutablePath: /usr/sbin/avahi-daemon
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-04-14 (1084 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Daily amd64 (20140413)
ProcCmdline: avahi-daemon:\ running\ [hostname.local]
ProcEnviron:

Signal: 6
SourcePackage: avahi
StacktraceTop:
 ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavahi-common.so.3
 avahi_malloc () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavahi-common.so.3
 avahi_prio_queue_put () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavahi-core.so.7
 avahi_time_event_new () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavahi-core.so.7
 ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavahi-core.so.7
Title: avahi-daemon crashed with SIGABRT in avahi_malloc()
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to zesty on 2017-04-03 (0 days ago)
UserGroups:

[Apport retracing service (apport)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this crash and helping to make this software better. This particular crash has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug #1668559, so is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Trent Lloyd (lathiat)]

Commenting here as the duplicate parent is Private at the moment.

Main issue is here, hitting rlimit-data which is set by default in the config file to 4M
> kernel: mmap: avahi-daemon (992): VmData 4272128 exceed data ulimit 4194304. Update limits or use boot option ignore_rlimit_data.

Not sure what is causing this to go high on a few machines, possibly number of services on the network. Testing here it looks like avahi needs generally about 2M when publishing 30+ services so this limit is likely way too low given we're over 50% there in common usage.

Main thing to confirm here is that this is simply hitting the limit in normal usage, and not a bug causing runaway memory usage. If anyone would like to test it would be great to:

 (a) Confirm whether this happens constantly (does avahi always crash) or did it happen once-off and not happen again. If restart now does it crash again? systemctl restart avahi-daemon
 (b) Modify /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf and change "rlimit-data=4194304" to "rlimit-data=16777216"
 (c) restart avahi-daemon again: systemctl restart avahi-daemon
 (c) report back if the crash occured both before, and after the change

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.