gnome-shell crashes occasionally (libmutter)

[Ralf Sternberg]

I see occasional crashes of gnome-shell that get me back to the login screen.

After these crashes I find something like the following line in dmesg:

gnome-shell[8428]: segfault at b0 ip 00007fddec8387d1 sp 00007ffdf2061a80 error 4 in libmutter-1.so.0.0.0[7fddec763000+142000]

Ubuntu: 17.10
gnome-shell: 3.26.2-0ubuntu0.1
mutter: 3.26.2-0ubuntu0.1

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Please apply the workaround from bug 994921, and then look in /var/crash for crash files, then run:

  ubuntu-bug /var/crash/YOURFILE.crash

That will create a new bug report so please tell us here the ID of the newly-created bug.

[Ralf Sternberg (ralf-sternberg)]

Thanks, I've applied the workaround. My /var/crash is currently empty, I'll follow your advice when the crash occurs again.

[Ralf Sternberg (ralf-sternberg)]

It just happened again. There is no file in /var/crash, just the aforementioned line in dmesg and also in /var/log/syslog.

It seems that everytime this crash happens I'm working with the Eclipse IDE. I also find those lines in syslog which might be related:

    java[30229]: Allocating size to GtkScrolledWindow 0x7fee4ab40de0 without calling gtk_widget_get_preferred_width/height(). How does the code know the size to allocate?

Anything else I could do to track it down?

[Ralf Sternberg (ralf-sternberg)]

I just noticed that the crash leaves a $HOME/core file:

    $ file core
    core: ELF 64-bit LSB core file x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), SVR4-style, from '/usr/bin/Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listen 4 -listen 5 -displayfd', real uid: 1000, effective uid: 1000, real gid: 1000, effective gid: 1000, execfn: '/usr/bin/Xwayland', platform: 'x86_64'

Could this be helpful?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Ralf,

That log message is very common in GTK apps. I don't think it is related to crashing.

As for $HOME/core, it sounds like you're now stuck on bug 1746874. Sorry. I hope we can fix that soon.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-shell (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]