crash in global constructor

[Christian Rauch]

An application built with libcamera-dev crashes instantly on start in a global constructor. This can be reproduced by the 'cam' example in package libcamera-tools (run 'cam -l') or via this simple example;

  #include <libcamera/libcamera.h>
  int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    libcamera::CameraManager camera_manager;
  }

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
Package: libcamera0 0~git20200629+e7aa92a-9
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.15.0-56.62-generic 5.15.64
Uname: Linux 5.15.0-56-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu82.2
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sat Dec 10 01:21:46 2022
InstallationDate: Installed on 2022-06-25 (167 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" - Release amd64 (20220419)
SourcePackage: libcamera
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Dylan Aïssi (daissi)]

Fixed in Lunar with libcamera 0.0.2.

cam -l doesn't crash anymore.

[Christian Rauch (christianrauch)]

This was reported against jammy (see "DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04") which still has the same version and issues. The issue has not been fixed.

[Dylan Aïssi (daissi)]

The libcamera version in Jammy is a almost 3 years old snaptshot of libcamera because at this time, there was no release of libcamera. libcamera is in active development with an API not yet stabilized that means development around libcamera should at least target a released version of libcamera, so the version in Jammy is probably is unusable. Moreover, in Ubuntu repositories, libcamera is only used by pipewire but only since Lunar. It is more likely that this bug won't be fixed in Jammy. You should consider another way to get a more recent libcamera.

[Christian Rauch (christianrauch)]

What does this mean for Ubuntu 22.04? The version of libcamera in 22.04 is broken and unusable. Is it going to stay this way? libcamera should either be removed entirely from the 22.04 repos or updated to a working version.

Keeping this broken version around does not make sense to me. Are there reasons why the broken version has to be kept in the repos?

[Dylan Aïssi (daissi)]

You can try to ask for an SRU https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates but because libcamera in 22.04 is something low priority, I doubt someone will work on it. Or if you really want it to be fixed, the best way is to prepare the patch yourself and find a sponsor. It is always delicate to update software in a stable release (in opposite to rolling releases).