blender 2.5 regression - cpu flatlines at 100% on default scene

[Wolfgang Kufner]

Binary package hint: xorg

Since about revision 24271 of blender 2.5 (self-compiled with scons):

reproduce:
start blender with default scene (i.e. no ~/.B25.blend file)
sooner or later (from seconds to an hour) one of my two cores flatlines at 100% blender use

happens both on this notebook with xorg-edgers and on an extensa 5635Z with stock karmic.

was able to reproduce one time out of three with LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 on the stock karmic system and 2 of 2 on the edgers system.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Nov 3 14:23:19 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
MachineType: Acer Extensa 5630
Package: xorg 1:7.4+3ubuntu7
PccardctlIdent:
 Socket 0:
   no product info available
PccardctlStatus:
 Socket 0:
   no card
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=UUID=c8f90551-03c2-4d41-93e1-df346762f95b ro quiet splash
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
RelatedPackageVersions:
 xserver-xorg 1:7.4+3ubuntu7
 libgl1-mesa-glx 7.7.0~git20091031.1cc16e1b-0ubuntu0tormod
 libdrm2 2.4.15+git20091030.b0b96636-0ubuntu0tormod
 xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.9.0+git20091026.10946118-0ubuntu0tormod
 xserver-xorg-video-ati N/A
SourcePackage: xorg
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic x86_64
XorgConf: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'
dmi.bios.date: 12/05/2008
dmi.bios.vendor: Phoenix Technologies LTD
dmi.bios.version: V1.25
dmi.board.name: Homa
dmi.board.vendor: Acer
dmi.board.version: Rev
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: Acer
dmi.chassis.version: N/A
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnPhoenixTechnologiesLTD:bvrV1.25:bd12/05/2008:svnAcer:pnExtensa5630:pvr0100:rvnAcer:rnHoma:rvrRev:cvnAcer:ct10:cvrN/A:
dmi.product.name: Extensa 5630
dmi.product.version: 0100
dmi.sys.vendor: Acer
fglrx: Not loaded
system:
 distro: Ubuntu
 architecture: x86_64kernel: 2.6.31-14-generic

[Pavol Klačanský (pavolzetor-deactivatedaccount)]

same problem, Intel driver, blender takes about 3 GB RAM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Wolfgang Kufner (wolfgangkufner)]

hypothesis: karmic's version of openal is the problem

workaround 1: echo 'drivers = alsa,oss,solaris,dsound,winmm,port,wave'
> ~/.alsoftrc
(back up your old .alsoftrc if you have one)
restart

workaround 2:
compile blender with WITH_BF_OPENAL = 'false'

I have only tried workaround 1. So far no more 100% CPU. But
since I never could dependably reproduce it all this needs further
testing.

[Pavol Klačanský (pavolzetor-deactivatedaccount)]

I will test it in weekend

[Wolfgang Kufner (wolfgangkufner)]

workaround 1 failed:
After leaving blender running for about one hour blender started to use up 100% of my cpu again. The only thing new is that I now had two blender processes and together they now used 100% of both my cores. Never seen that before. Might be because the scene was different or because of changes to the parallelization capabilities in this new revision of blender. I do not think it is related to the (failed) workaround.

I have now compiled blender with
WITH_BF_OPENAL = False
added to my user-config.py
and have blender running for over an hour now. So far so good.

[bassam (bkurdali)]

I can confirm this is an openal bug; specifically it has to do with openal and pulsaudio.
Interestingly, when in this 100% cpu, changing blender's soundsystem to sdl or none causes blender to hang, but 'killall pulseaudio' at the commandline makes this go. I've been told the recent version of openal 1.10 is working better with pulse and should fix this bug.

[Wolfgang Kufner (wolfgangkufner)]

I looked a bit closer than before and saw that the openal packages in karmic (and lucid) come from the "openal-soft" (not "openal") package.
Lucid has newer ones, so a next step could be to try how blender 2.5 behaves under lucid.

[ITrAB (barti-c64)]

I've added '-openal=0' in command line, and it's working ;P

[ITrAB (barti-c64)]

Oops... sorry it was stupid ;P

[Josh Wedlake (josh-wedlake)]

see https://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=23450&group_id=9&atid=498