gvfsd-metadata crashed with SIGSEGV in g_timeout_dispatch()

[Chris J]

Binary package hint: gvfs

Seemingly random, happens in the background with some disk activity, sometimes heavy, sometimes not, sometimes with a USB HD connected, sometimes not. Can't figure out how to reproduce, filing in the vain hope the retracer will reveal something.

ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: i386
CrashCounter: 1
Date: Thu Jan 7 18:46:24 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-metadata
Package: gvfs 1.4.1-0ubuntu1
ProcCmdline: /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-metadata
ProcCwd: /
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-17.54-generic
SegvAnalysis:
 Segfault happened at: 0x804d2ea: mov 0x8(%edx),%edx
 PC (0x0804d2ea) ok
 source "0x8(%edx)" (0x00000008) not located in a known VMA region (needed readable region)!
 destination "%edx" ok
SegvReason: reading NULL VMA
Signal: 11
SourcePackage: gvfs
StacktraceTop:
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 g_timeout_dispatch (source=0x8055320, callback=0x9b5ba40,
Title: gvfsd-metadata crashed with SIGSEGV in g_timeout_dispatch()
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-17-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin audio cdrom dialout dip floppy lpadmin plugdev sambashare scanner video
XsessionErrors:
 (<unknown>:8292): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width 250 and height -1
 (nautilus:15394): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed

[Sebastian Keller (skeller)]

This crash happens here several times a day. From looking at the backtrace and the source I guess meta_tree_flush_locked() gets called on a MetaTree which got cleared by meta_tree_clear before as the root is NULL and all other cases in which root gets changed seem to be checked for NULL.

[Chris J (chriscf)]

Three weeks and no retrace? What gives? (bug 508472)

[Sebastian Keller (skeller)]

This still happened with 1.5.2, I didn't test 1.5.3 anymore as there were no changes to the metadata code. It is caused by corrupted metadata files. Deleting these fixes this issue for me. You can find them in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/ and some of it is stored in gconf, too - you can delete it using "gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/nautilus/desktop-metadata". Another thing I noticed is that the desktop-icon positions never seemed to be remembered, but maybe thats just because the daemon died and so nautilus couldn't get it.
I'm attaching a copy of the metadata before I removed the directory.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Upstream bug has been marked as duplicate of bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=598561

[Apport retracing service (apport)]

StacktraceTop:copy_tree_to_builder (tree=0x9b5ba40, dirent=0x0, builder_file=0x9b5c690)
meta_tree_flush_locked (tree=<value optimized out>)
meta_tree_flush (tree=0x9b5ba40) at metatree.c:2365
writeout_timeout (data=0x9b5c4b8) at meta-daemon.c:61
?? () from /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0