[gutsy] Pidgin 2.1.0 crashes on the freshly updated libc6

[Adrian Penisoara]

Binary package hint: pidgin

Immediately after updating libc6 today (and restarting the system), Pidgin would keep crashing upon starting it up (automatic accounts logging in, automatic joining to a few XMPPS chat rooms). Pidgin was working just fine previous to today's libc6 update.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug report. Please try to obtain a backtrace http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[Adrian Penisoara (adrian.penisoara)]

Here is attached the gdb crash backtrace. Surprisingly, under valgrind it did not crash...

More details:

$ apt-cache show libc6
Package: libc6
Priority: required
Section: base
Installed-Size: 10108
Maintainer: Ubuntu Core developers <email address hidden>
Original-Maintainer: GNU Libc Maintainers <email address hidden>
Architecture: i386
Source: glibc
Version: 2.6.1-0ubuntu1
Provides: glibc-2.6-1
Depends: libgcc1
Suggests: locales, glibc-doc
Conflicts: libterm-readline-gnu-perl (<< 1.15-2), tzdata (<< 2007e-2)
Filename: pool/main/g/glibc/libc6_2.6.1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
Size: 4182062
MD5sum: c248f12b4a75bf618881082f740b023c
SHA1: 78a4f7dacaa8f11ff0aa25a162ffa371d9db1710
SHA256: 5b05accee952294549f7c51fd1f87cba8823602fde815752f13b8825bf5d41dd
Description: GNU C Library: Shared libraries
 Contains the standard libraries that are used by nearly all programs on
 the system. This package includes shared versions of the standard C library
 and the standard math library, as well as many others.
Bugs: mailto:<email address hidden>
Origin: Ubuntu

[Bastiaan Wakkie (bwakkie)]

I have the same. here is my bracktrace file

[Adrian Penisoara (adrian.penisoara)]

My problem has been fixed with the latest updates. I have not seen any libc6 update, but something somehow fixed my problem.

[Adrian Penisoara (adrian.penisoara)]

Once again, after the latest round of updates, Pidgin crashes again, backtrace appears to indicate an issue in libc6's free() ?

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread -1224808240 (LWP 6439)]
0xb75ac7cc in free () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6

[Adrian Penisoara (adrian.penisoara)]

Right name for libc6 is glibc

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

reassigning to glib2.0, g_free is called before. please investigate if that call is valid. we had a glib2.0 update these days as well.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug report. Could you try to get a valgrind log for the crash (you can follow the instructions on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind)?

[Adrian Penisoara (adrian.penisoara)]

No, running Pidgin under valgrind does not crash. I use this as a workaround to be able to use Pidgin (albeit quite slow) :).

[Adrian Penisoara (adrian.penisoara)]

Found the root cause: I was sharing the .purple configuration directory between two Ubuntu installations (symlink between homes), Feisty and Gutsy. When I recreated the Pidgin configuration from scratch in Gutsy, the crashes stopped reproducing.

In more detail, I found that the accounts.xml file from the Feisty installation (also Pidgin 2.1.0) would trigger the crash.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

not a glib bug

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for the update, this use is not supported, you should have the configuration corresponding to the version of ubuntu you are using, closing the bug