Ardour on Lunar crashes gnome-shell (for existing user)

[Adrian Custer]

Thanks for all your work.

I am running ardour with a low-latency kernel and via the command:
pw-jack ardour
which has been working in kinetic and ardour6. After upgrade to lunar and ardour7, this causes a crash of gnome-shell (aka the display) for my user but not for a new user.

Recently, I upgraded to lunar from a partition that has been updated from hirsuite. I also installed lunar from scratch (iso) on another partition. (I have done this on 2 separate machines, both lenovo tiny, one m710q the other m720q.)

If I create a new, empty user. I can run ardour without issues.

However, when I try to run ardour from my home directory (with lots of legacy) which is mounted on another partition, when ardour runs, it takes down gnome-shell. Crash, then presented a login screen.

There should be an automated submission of gnome-shell crashes for a machine with the characteristics of this machine (lenovo tiny) in the auto-submitted pool.

I have tried, without success:

rm /etc/ardour*
rm /usr/share/ardour*
rm .config/ardour*
pw-jack ardour

also I tried

apt purge ardour ardour-data ardour-lv2-plugins ardour-video-timeline
apt install ardour ardour-data ardour-lv2-plugins ardour-video-timeline
pw-jack ardour

but the problem persists.

I would be glad to provide more info, but don't know how to catch gnome-shell as it crashes in a gdb session or some such.

cheers,
  ~adrian

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 23.04
Package: ardour 1:7.3.0+ds0-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.2.0-1003.3-lowlatency 6.2.6
Uname: Linux 6.2.0-1003-lowlatency x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.26.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sat Apr 22 12:01:46 2023
InstallationDate: Installed on 2021-11-14 (524 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo" - Release amd64 (20210420)
SourcePackage: ardour
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Adrian Custer (acuster)]

This might or might not be related to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ardour/+bug/2012158

[Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer)]

Pipewire and Ardour are currently incompatible per the Ardour developers. Please see https://ubuntustudio.org/switching-audio-setup/

[Adrian Custer (acuster)]

Ardour works great with pipewire.

Only if you want *Professional-level* audio, are there issues, and only on the edge of perfection. The setup is perfectly functional and valid, unless you can't tolerate slight variations in latency. Most users don't need this kind of accuracy.

[Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer)]

Then you will need to bring your opinion up with the ardour developers. Unfortunately, due to their stance on PipeWire with *their* product (which they have every right to, by the way), I will be marking every bug mentioning PipeWire with Ardour as "Won't Fix" since it's outside of Ardour's scope at this time, and that's not my stance, that's *their* stance. Sorry.

[Adrian Custer (acuster)]

Pipewire and Ardour are GREAT together!

When Robin Gareus speaks of "pro-audio" he is not talking about the majority of users. For a few, very demanding users, pipewire is not at the level of JACK. For the rest of us, pipewire is great.

Regardless, there is no excuse for a desktop program to crash the desktop. Something wierd is happening. Just now, I tried via:
$oldsh$ gdb bash
...
gdb> run

$newBash$ ardour

=> crash

That crash cause an automatic report from apport-gtk when I logged back in. Not sure why. There does not seem to be a way to reference those automated reports for you.

cheers,
  ~adrian

[Adrian Custer (acuster)]

Ah, got caught by a stale refresh of the page (after a crash).

This bug is not Ardour's and not really pipewire's, it's Ubuntu's. You have a desktop program crashing the desktop. If it were Ardour crashing that would be one thing; if it were pipewire that would be another. Here *gnome-shell* aka the login session crashes. That's not supposed to happen.

Is there no way to sandbox the session, to catch the crash of a session by a user app?

~adrian

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It sounds like some part of the system has crashed. To help us find the cause of the crash please follow these steps:

1. Look in /var/crash for crash files and if found run:
    ubuntu-bug YOURFILE.crash
Then tell us the ID of the newly-created bug.

2. If step 1 failed then look at https://errors.ubuntu.com/user/ID where ID is the content of file /var/lib/whoopsie/whoopsie-id on the machine. Do you find any links to recent problems on that page? If so then please send the links to us.

Please take care to avoid attaching .crash files to bugs as we are unable to process them as file attachments. It would also be a security risk for yourself.

[Adrian Custer (acuster)]

Hello,

Thanks for the follow up. I don't see any 'id' field in the ubunut-bug window. It does give me:
Duplicate of:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1959507
which seems about right. Something to do with window scaling which ardour7 can do and ardour6 could not.

whoopsie id is:
a2f0ac40ac4e21ab104e46eec15db40b7c20364db5cf417d15ea86c9efdb517cf428a65e74e8114b46dbc17911f79e82f54c650d9da32cc8136621ef2aeb5ae6

and I have just submitted another gnome-shell crash report due to ardour7 with timestamp:
Mon Apr 24 08:29:19 2023

Hope that helps. Cheers,
~adrian

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The crash on 24 April 2023 from the above whoopsie id is:
https://errors.ubuntu.com/oops/e906380c-e294-11ed-a0c6-fa163e993415

But there is no more information beyond it being an assertion failure. So the bots are again wrong to point to bug 1959507. This misidentification problem is being tracked in bug 1982283.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 23.04 (lunar) reached end-of-life on January 25, 2024.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it anymore. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test. If you then find the bug is still present in the newer Ubuntu version, please add a comment here telling us which new version it is in.