Viewer crashing on exit on Ubuntu Karmic

Hi,

I'm running a variety of viewers (stock, rc and Emerald) on my Dell laptop (Dual core 2.4, nVidia Quadro FX1600m GPU with nVidia binary driver, hda_intel Sigmatel STAC audio).

They all worked fine on Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) but now I've changed to Karmic (9.10) all the viewers crash on exit. I can start the any of the viewers then close it fine but if I log in then ctrl-q or click the "x" to close the app it locks solid and leaves all three binaries running (sl, do not run directly and voice). I end up having to kill the do-not-directly-run binary to get it to shut and this causes settign changes to be lost.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour please?

Any suggestions to cure it greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Pap.

Hi,

I searched the PJIRA and this seems quite similar to http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7650 except it just crashes the viewer, not the whole machine. With nVidia binary driver release 185 installed I get the symptom above but if I revert to release 173 the problem goes away.

IIRC I was on release 180 when I was running Jaunty and that was fine too so it appears to be something that has crept into the binary driver since then.

Cheers,
Pap.

Dunno. I've observed the crashing at logout in karmic, too, and I've got an ATi card. I'm currently using omvviewer, which also didn't show this behavior under jaunty.

Karmic is not crashing on me when logging out while using the i386 install. But when i run x84 SL crashes on log out, the process won't end and requires killing, and sometimes it would quit and the process would remain.

I've also noticed Emerald eating up 1.6 to 2.6 gigs of ram now for me when i was running x64. The i386 version seems to top out around 1.1 gigs last i checked.

Also, Gstream doesn't work in x64 and i never had any stream action, but now running i386 i have music in SL, just no sound..and of course 4 gigs less of ram available.

Ubuntu x64 is stressful.

And now sound is working for me every where.

I still have some issues to iron up before i decided if i am going to do x64 again or not.

i386 requires less configuring and library hunting to get things to work properly.

I also just switched to KDE4 (Kubuntu) and its sweet.

Correction.

After installing Flash, Emerald under Karmic i386 is crashing on logout.

Oh well.

I'm getting the same thing in Karmic.
No matter how I try to log out (menu, ctrl +Q, or just close window), the viewer still freezes up and have to manually kill the do-not-directly-run process.
In the System Monitor->Processes tab, the "Waiting Channel" column says something about a futex_wait_cue_me (there may be more at the end but I can't see it) and "Status" shows it's "Sleeping". Dunno if that means anything or not

Ubuntu x64 is a pain in the butt.

My main function of my computer is: SL, Web Browsing, Word Processing, Video Editing, DVD Burning.

If i cannot at least do SL without 'issues' then i cannot use the OS. Ubuntu 8.10 was a dream compared to 9.04 & 9.10 and everything worked on first install, including the volume knob on my keyboard. But KDE4 in Kubuntu has been the worst experience ever, both x32 and x64 versions.

I moved over to Kubuntu Karmic, after I had some problems with removing pulseaudio in Ubuntu, I liked KDE, and have stuck with it, it can be temperamental, but once you learn its quirks, it runs fine, for me at least.

I'm beginning to sound repetitive here, but I ran into serious problems running SL with pulseaudio running, including SLVoice which pretty much killed pulseaudio, and SLVoice started using very high amounts of CPU. Also exiting with pulseaudio installed, resulted in the viewer crashing on exit (mostly hanging though), pulseaudio 'respawns' after a crash now, so it was a very messy situation. During the viewer session pulseaudio crashed as soon as voice connected, but pulseaudio respawned, so voice and music (UI sounds stopped working), seemed to be working, although voice sound was terrible, a garbled mess. Although, 10-15 minutes into the session, the viewer slowed to a crawl, as more CPU and memory was chewed up, and eventually the viewer either crashed, or stuttered badly, and had to kill it, via system monitor. This is what drove me to try Kubuntu.

I removed pulseaudio, and have yet to run into a problem, all sounds work for me at least simultaneously, including the new version of skype, while using SLVoice.

On Kubuntu Karmic 32 bit (pae desktop Kernel installed so I can use 4GB RAM and over), and without pulseaudio, I have everything working in the sounds department, SL has music, and video works great !!, I'm pretty happy with it, as it is......and bonus, KDE is pretty, lol.

EDITED TO ADD:
I installed Kubuntu Karmic from Beta, and pulseaudio was not installed by default, although in Ubuntu and Kubuntu, the same above behaviour was observed, while pulseaudio was running.

For me, the viewer would hang at logout with Karmic and sound was terrible until I told the startup script to disable OpenAL and now everything seems fine and I can hear again. (This after a lot of futile fiddling with /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf just because it had been updated in the 9.10 install, but it had nothing to do with the problem.)

If it happens that others are having OpenAL / Karmic problems, it may be time for a jira.

I don't know that it's SL's fault. OpenAL has a very, very bad reputation for not playing nice with PulseAudio.

I used to have PulseAudio crashing issues with PulseAudio 0.9.10. However, since updating to 0.9.14, I have never had to deal with a PA crash issue ever again. OpenAL sounded absolutely terrible, however (as did the system login sound, which uses libcanberra). But going into /etc/pulse/default.pa and setting tsched=0 fixed that problem, at the expense of a little extra CPU usage.

Hearing about PulseAudio crashing when SL is running in Karmic is very disconcerting, as this sounds like a severe regression on PulseAudio's part. It may be more productive to file a bug report in Ubuntu's Launchpad against the PulseAudio package.

One other thing I've had to do in order to get a more stable audio experience when I have SLVoice running was to go into my Secondlife directory, into the lib directory in there, and rename libopenal.so.1 to something else, thereby forcing the viewer to use the OpenAL system that comes with Ubuntu. It might be worth trying in your situation.

I to am also having issues with SL just locking up solid on Logout with Karmic.

Ok, my sound was crackling and i was crashing repeatedly and always on exit. Used the following line :

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio

Sound has been better, less crashy too.

Well, I just upgraded to Karmic a couple of days ago. Lots of changes compared to Jaunty that I hope get cleaned up, refined, and added to the next LTS (which should be Lucid Lynx, 10.04). But, as things stand right now, Karmic was not ready for release. I'm having wireless issues I haven't had since Gutsy; Pulseaudio is a bit unpredictable, OSD-notification looks rough, and there's all sorts of places that need more refinement and work. I think they changed too much too fast, and didn't have enough time to completely iron out the kinks.

If you haven't upgraded to Karmic yet, I recommend waiting.

Anyway, I was able to experience first-hand what everyone is running into here. Pulseaudio itself has gotten more robust. It immediately respawns if it crashes, and it respawns crashed sinks. The hang on logout in the SL viewer appears to be the result of SL not shutting down its ALSA connections properly and Pulseaudio keeps respawning them. In short, everything wrong with SL and Pulseaudio is because of OpenAL. Switching SL to use FMOD made SL on Pulseaudio very stable. Unfortunately, ALSA support in FMOD is very broken; so FMOD attempts to use ESD instead. This works, but results in severe buffering issues with streaming music.

I did a lot of poking around with both Pulseaudio and with OpenAL. There were not many changes I could do to PA's configuration that made any difference. In fact, trying the TSCHED=0 trick actually made things much worse. The latest versions of OpenAL recognize and work with Pulseaudio; unfortunately, this is incompatible with SL. Trying to set OpenAL to use Pulse through ~/.alsoftrc completely breaks SL audio. The best I could do was to set the buffer size in ~/.alsoftrc to a ridiculous number, such as 20480. This greatly reduced the incidents of sound failure within SL, and allows the viewer to exit properly; but it greatly increases delay in the sound, so UI sounds are no longer in sync with their associated actions. 20480 seems to be a reasonable compromise.

I also noticed that, despite my best efforts, all in-world sounds (except for streaming music, streaming media, and voice) still occasionally dies. Simply opening Pulseaudio Manager (paman), clicking the "Devices" tab, locating the sink corresponding to SL (usually shows up as "ALSA Playback", highlighting it and clicking "Properties", then clicking "Kill", causes the crashed sink to respawn, and all will be well again for at least a little while.

I'll have to try the libsdl trick and see if that improves anything. But, for the long term, LL is going to have to find a more system-friendly, Pulseaudio-compatible audio engine to use in their Linux viewers. FMOD is broken for modern systems, and OpenAL seems to be suffering from spotty development.

SL is the primary use for my computer which is why i switched to Windows 7x64. Jaunty x64 was no great thing either, numerous issues with x64 and many other programs that just wouldn't run, and specifically SL issues, like no sound - which for me is a deal killer because SL is my primary use.

8.10 i386 was the last Ubu i ran that was most perfect for my system but i can't go back to that since working in 32 bit is rather lame when you only have 3gigs of ram and SL eats up 1gig+, then there is also running at the same time: gimp, firefox, thunderbird, streamrunner, audacious2, Gkrellm, and a few other things going and *poof* no more ram. 64 bit is mandatory for me.

I am rather sad that Jaunty and Karmic have issues. I tried KDE4 too and that had sooooooo many issues for me. I prefer the clean interface of Gnome as i found myself installing other gnome things like Gedit and Synaptic.

Now i am stuck in Windows 7 and will have to buy this stupid OS just to run my machine.

I wish i could get Snow Leopard on this machine but the procedure seems somewhat complex and not guaranteed depending on your hardware, so i said forget it.

Winblows for now...again.

Jaunty is a good OS, and is worth keeping around. I'm still reading up on the particulars for getting it done, but I do know that if you can get your hands on the 32-bit PAE kernel, you can access significantly more than 3GB of memory. The PAE kernels are available in Karmic's repos, so I'll be giving it a try myself soon, once I can find another period of time when I can afford to be without my laptop for a couple of days "just in case".

Come find me in-world, because I owe you a huge, juicy smooch!

I installed that package, rebooted, and just spent the last 8 hours in-world and have not had one single issue with Pulseaudio - not even so much as a glitch!

Ok, extra semi tweak. I was still havin issues after the pulse fix and still have crashes on exit. Asked on Ubuntu Forums, had a new semi fix for those that are still crashing. Stopped all my crashing completely.



gedit /path/to/snowglobe (or secondlife, or whatever client you use)

uncomment the line to disable openal:

export LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x



Credit for that one goes to RabidWeezle of Ubuntu Forums. Linkage to thread below :

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1322639

That is probably the best way to fix the problem, by completely removing OpenAL from the equation. However, it also introduces new problems, at least on my system: Streaming music frequently buffer-underruns, skips, repeats. This doesn't happen with streaming media because that uses gstreamer instead of FMOD. This is weird to me, though, because FMOD used to be the *only* method available for rendering sound in SL for us, and it worked fine then... So, might have to play around with buffers somewhere.

Anyway, there were a few other tweaks I did to Pulseaudio that might have also helped fix my OpenAL stability issues:

In /etc/pulse/default.pa:
- Comment out the line, "load-module module-suspend-on-idle"

In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:
- Uncomment "high-priority = yes"
- Change nice-level from -11 to -15
- I also changed resample-method to speex-float-5, but this shouldn't have anything to do with the OpenAL issues.

One solution to the OpenAL problem I have found is to replace the stock libopenal with the latest version compiled from source; the version of libopenal included with Ubuntu Karmic has a bug, fixed in later releases, which distorts voice capture.

The link to the source is here:
http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html#download

I've posted build instructions for Ubuntu Karmic here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8318198&postcount=20

This should fix instances of high CPU usage, SL Viewer crashing on exit, and distorted voice capture.