Wireshark crashes with a SIGSEGV when starting a capture or opening a pcap file

[Andreas]

Upon opening a pcap file or starting a capture from a device, wireshark hangs and crashes after a while.

When launching wireshark from a console, a bunch of "CRITICAL GLib-GObject-CRITICAL" errors can be seen.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: wireshark 1.10.2-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-12.19-generic 3.11.3
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Oct 23 09:13:47 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-12-07 (319 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release amd64(20121023)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: wireshark
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-17 (5 days ago)

[Evan Huus (eapache)]

How long is "after a while"? Is it possible you are simply running out of memory? Is it possible for you to produce a backtrack of the crash?

Thanks,
Evan

[Andreas (andreas-9)]

No. It's most likely not a memory issue. It takes about 6 seconds for the crash. If you launch it from the console it takes a lot longer, because it prints a massive bunch of these Gobject errors to the console.
While doing all this it eats almost 100% cpu time and only about 5% of my memory according to htop.

I attached a few of the error messages. They are repeating a few hundred to thousand times.
After that the segfault happens. I attached a backtrace and it looks totally strange. The stack looks screwed.

As I said, it happens with a small (2kB) pcap file (from a trustworthy source) and when starting a capture. There shouldn't be much memory connsumption at that time.

[Evan Huus (eapache)]

Based on the liboverlayscrollbar frames in the trace, this is probably related to bug #1208583. It might even be a duplicate, though the symptoms and stack trace are slightly different. Regardless, running "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" should probably fix the issue. If it does I will reassign this to the overlay-scrollbar project.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

Hmm. I'm thinking about disabling overlay scrollbar from Wireshark itself at least on Debian/Ubuntu as a workaround for this bug.

[Evan Huus (eapache)]

Not a bad idea, just wrap a shell script that exports the environment variable?

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

No, I would just add a simple setenv() if it works.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

There is a black list in overlay-scrollbar for incompatible applications and I requested wireshark to be added instead of playing with out binary:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wireshark/+bug/1208583/comments/10

[Andreas (andreas-9)]

Setting LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 works for me. No more crashes.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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