Gnome 45 crash on restart in X11 session [Window manager error: Another compositing manager is already running on screen 0 on display “:0”]

[Batwam]

Hello,

Since the upgrade to Ubuntu 23.10 with Gnome45, it is no longer possible to restart gnome-shell without crashing the session. The only way not to crash it is to close all applications before restarting gnome-shell. I have verified this too.

This has already been reported upstream: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7050
a tentative patch for mutter proposed: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7050#note_1876598

Please consider reviewing/testing this patch and pushing an update so people can restart gnome-shell session without crashing it.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I don't see any evidence that upstream bug is related to this yet...

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. Run these commands:
    journalctl -b0 > journal.txt
    journalctl -b-1 > prevjournal.txt
and attach the resulting text files here.

2. 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.

3. If step 2 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.

[Batwam (batwam)]

thanks for following up. I have attached my journal.txt and you will find the same error in at as in the gnome-shell gitlab bug `Window manager error: Another compositing manager is already running on screen 0 on display “:0”`.

Also, the same behaviour occurs as if I close all windows before restarting, it doesn't crash which is what made me think that they are related. I also only started noticing this when I started to test 23.10 in gnome-boxes prior to the release (I frequently do gnome-shell restarts as I contribute to extensions) and noticed this behaviour right away as I never had the issue with 23.04. As soon as I upgraded my machine, the restarts started to crash (which makes testing extensions quite tedious).

note that I cleared up the journal before running this test. I also cleared up my crash logs to see but it's not generating any report.

There are a number of gnome-shell crashes linked to my woopside-id, including the following:
https://errors.ubuntu.com/oops/0b660737-7287-11ee-9b14-fa163ec44ecd
https://errors.ubuntu.com/oops/14ef2be8-195c-11ee-b183-fa163e55efd0
https://errors.ubuntu.com/oops/1a4daae8-0925-11ee-bcf5-fa163ef35206

I am not sure the above reports are directly connected to this issue but based on the fact that many people seem to be having the same issue since gnome45 is out, this doesn't look like an isolated issue. See this discussion on github for instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7050

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

OK let's link this to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7050

https://errors.ubuntu.com/oops/0b660737-7287-11ee-9b14-fa163ec44ecd sounds similar to bug 2039340, which is similar to a bunch of crashes in getenv that are probably all the same bug.

[Batwam (batwam)]

yeah, I haven't necessarily reported every crash I've experienced in launchpad as I've been restarting gnome-shell quite a bit when updating my extensions to gnome45 and couldn't be sure whether the crash was caused by the extension or gnome-shell itself.

This crash on the other hand stayed when I upgraded on bare metal and was also reported by a number of people contributing to gnome-extensions which is why I felt it was worth investigating. I have seen extensions commenting on this in their ReadMe and I'm yet to find someone who isn't experiencing a crash when restarting gnome-shell on X11.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Konstantin Sal (salah83)]

Same here ((

[Rustin Schenk (rmschenk)]

I also have this bug on 23.10. Alt+F2 entering r to restart gnome-shell crashes with error message "oops something went wrong" then says to logout. If I close all open applications, Alt+F2 r works with no crash. Did not have this problem on 23.04.

[[e-mail] (mike-papersolve)]

This bug is definitely important to me, being able to restart GNOME Shell after it locks up, crashes, or updating an extension, _without_ losing any of my work or having to restart a large amount of open programs, is one of the main reasons I still run it on X11. Luckily I was testing 23.10 in a VM while working on porting an extension and so haven't updated my main machine yet. But I won't be doing that until this is fixed. There is a patch on their gitlab but they have to test it? It's relatively simple so we could all test a PPA with the change.

[Daniel Mejares Teaño (2k16daniel)]

Im also affected with this bug

[Delfin (sagitariozod)]

I also have this bug on 23.10. Alt+F2 entering r to restart gnome-shell crashes with error message "oops something went wrong" then says to logout.

[[e-mail] (mike-papersolve)]

I tested this with the very small patch indicated in #1 and it worked.

I did
"apt-src install mutter"
applied the patch.txt file with "patch -p1 < patch.txt"
"apt-src build mutter"
it fails all the tests but apparently this is expected, so i just went into the obj directory and did "sudo ninja install" and it replaced all the versions from the original .deb package. I logged out and back in, and then I was able to restart gnome-shell (alt+f2 and r) while I still had windows open.

Their discussions about this issue seem to have gotten bogged down in minutiae of what other bugs are related, does some other bigger patch fix those bugs, no one tested it, etc. So I think it might be a good idea to carry this small patch for now, and hopefully by the time it starts conflicting it will no longer be necessary because it will be fixed some other way. :)

[seth tro (sethtro)]

This also affects me after an upgrade from 23.04 to 23.10. Same issue that restart only works if no windows are open.

Using the fix in #1, following the mutter build instructions from https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/gnome/mutter.html fixed the issue for me.

[kenjo (ken-kenjo)]

I can confirm this patch solved my issues also. I have some other issue that ends up in a mutter restart on suspend resume and this bug made supending compleatly unusable since I lost the desktop.

To get around the build issue with "apt-src install mutter" I changed the rules file in the debian directory to not run the test on my arch

from
ifeq (,$(filter mips mips64el mipsel riscv64 s390x alpha hppa powerpc sparc64 x32,$(DEB_HOST_ARCH)))

to
ifeq (,$(filter mips mips64el mipsel riscv64 s390x alpha hppa powerpc sparc64 x32 amd64,$(DEB_HOST_ARCH)))

[lousuan (lousuan)]

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3329

It seems the developer team of gnome will fix this bug in version 46.1.

Any progress or plan for ubuntu? Will it be fixed in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

If it lands in 46.1 then Ubuntu 24.04 will get it after that.

[Zhen (riceballbmw1)]

Hi Team, may I know when will Ubuntu 24.04 get update with 46.1? Thanks!

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

In progress: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3329