systemd-journald crashed with SIGABRT - triggered by Google hangouts

[Steve Langasek]

I am experiencing crashes of journald with annoying frequency, which present as a system lockup (UI unresponsive) for several minutes, followed by a popup dialog telling me that journald has crashed.

These crashes are always linked to use of google hangouts - not necessarily video hangouts, although they can trigger it; but also ordinary text hangouts of the sort that get loaded in a sidebar on https://plus.google.com. It is entirely unclear to me what the mechanism is by which this crash is happening, but if I have https://plus.google.com open, after the UI unfreezes I see that journald has crashed *and* the google hangout javascript in the window has crashed.

ProblemType: Crash
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: systemd 225-1ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.1.0-3.3-generic 4.1.3
Uname: Linux 4.1.0-3-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.18.1-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
CrashCounter: 1
Date: Mon Sep 14 08:40:35 2015
ExecutablePath: /lib/systemd/systemd-journald
InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-09-24 (1816 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
MachineType: LENOVO 2306CTO
ProcCmdline: /lib/systemd/systemd-journald
ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-4.1.0-3-generic root=/dev/mapper/hostname-root ro quiet splash
Signal: 6
SourcePackage: systemd
StacktraceTop:
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
Title: systemd-journald crashed with SIGABRT
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to wily on 2015-08-17 (28 days ago)
UserGroups:

dmi.bios.date: 10/25/2013
dmi.bios.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.bios.version: G2ET97WW (2.57 )
dmi.board.asset.tag: Not Available
dmi.board.name: 2306CTO
dmi.board.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.board.version: Not Defined
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: No Asset Information
dmi.chassis.type: 10
dmi.chassis.vendor: LENOVO
dmi.chassis.version: Not Available
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnLENOVO:bvrG2ET97WW(2.57):bd10/25/2013:svnLENOVO:pn2306CTO:pvrThinkPadX230:rvnLENOVO:rn2306CTO:rvrNotDefined:cvnLENOVO:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
dmi.product.name: 2306CTO
dmi.product.version: ThinkPad X230
dmi.sys.vendor: LENOVO

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

One of the related bugs just saw 1433320 offered as a possible match. If the system is locked up hard enough that processes are not responding, it makes sense that this could be a watchdog kill. In that case, these crash reports should probably be suppressed since they provide no information that can be used to diagnose the problem.

[Apport retracing service (apport)]

StacktraceTop:
 journal_file_move_to_object (f=0x5621160d5fa0, type=OBJECT_ENTRY_ARRAY, offset=752104, ret=0x7fffbc38f480) at ../src/journal/journal-file.c:498
 link_entry_into_array.lto_priv.145 (f=0x5621160d5fa0, first=0x7f2c830fb960, idx=0x7fffbc38f500, p=9865528) at ../src/journal/journal-file.c:1184
 link_entry_into_array_plus_one (p=9865528, idx=0x7f2c830fb968, first=0x7f2c830fb960, extra=0x7f2c830fb958, f=0x5621160d5fa0) at ../src/journal/journal-file.c:1260
 journal_file_link_entry_item (i=<optimized out>, offset=9865528, o=0x7f2c830fb930, f=0x5621160d5fa0) at ../src/journal/journal-file.c:1284
 journal_file_link_entry (offset=9865528, o=0x7f2c84e0b938, f=0x5621160d5fa0) at ../src/journal/journal-file.c:1325

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Indeed this is very similar to bug 1433320 and all of its duplicates -- the kernel detects that some process(es) get hard-locked up, the hardware watchdog (which systemd configures for some crucial services to auto-restart them via "WatchdogSec=1min") picks this up and restarts the process. This won't do much good if there's some general kernel lockup.

> In that case, these crash reports should probably be suppressed since they provide no information that can be used to diagnose the problem.

I agree, they only describe the symptom, not the cause. So I'll add an apport task, and duplicate this.