GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 91056
Panel disappears when exiting multiple windows
Last modified: 2009-12-19 07:10:54 UTC
I have an edge panel at the top of screen 0, the left screen in a 2-screen Xinerama configuration. I use NEdit (http://www.nedit.org/) with multiple windows open. When I exit NEdit, all these windows close at once. This causes the panel to crash. This seems independent of the Workspace Switcher or the Window List. The panel crashes with or without them. The behavior can be reproduced reliably. I mention the Xinerama setup because I can't reproduce this on my computer with only one screen. It is incredibly annoying because, after I kill the X server and log in again, I get a new panel without ANY of my old configuration. But that must be another bug.
Jeffrey: without a stack trace this is going to be hard to fix/track down, especially if it only happens on Xinerama- that's not exactly something we all have laying around :) Can you get us one? Thanks.
Well I investigated a little further, and the panel doesn't actually crash properly. It just disappears from the display and keeps running. I'll have to dig more, because I can't just grab a stack dump.
I found a case that doesn't require Xinerama. On one screen, I had an instance of VMWare that mapped and unmapped a lot of windows very quickly, and this also crashed the panel. I will try to make a testcase that simply maps and unmaps windows rapidly.
Jeffrey: is it still happening ? Could you try HEAD ?
Debian experimental is about as far as I'm willing to go. I'll be sure to check the next release though.
Jeffrey: is it still happening ?
With 2.0.11 gnome-panel, the problem still occurs. Changing the title based on my observation that any multi-window closure hoses the panel. Further observation has shown that the panel doesn't exit, it just disappears. I can't start another panel, because the old one is still running. To fix the situation, I have to kill the panel, and another is started automatically. Given the new applet preferences persistence, this bug is much less annoying than it used to be.
This may be fixed in GNOME 2.1.x, because lots of work have been done on multihead stuff. But I can't figure why the xinerama setup can cause a crash here... Reopening for the moment.
Jeffrey: which window manager is this with ? It sounds like a WM bug ... could you try with a different WM and tell us if you can reproduce it then ?
I cannot reproduce this problem with Metacity, so it may be a problem with sawfish.
So moving to sawfish.
I think this is the bug I'm suffering from, although the symptoms are slightly different. I also use Xinerama, but I'm not affected in single head mode, nor when running Metacity instead of sawfish. The symptoms are that windows disappear, but the applications in them are still running. gnome-terminal is a common victim, but that could be just because it's the one thing I'm nearly always running. There are two things that cause this: opening gmplayer without a font installed, so that it pops up an error box; and downloading a small file in galeon such that it's finished downloading before the download progress window has a chance to open. When this happens with galeon, it usually only affects a nearby gnome-terminal, or sometimes the main galeon window. With gmplayer, it seems to affect several windows and the panel.
I forgot to mention this happens when I run sawfish with Rox instead of Gnome, so it's definitely a sawfish problem.
Reassigning the bug to the owner...
I can't reproduce this. Could someone who can recompile sawfish in debugging mode and attach a trace? (edit src/sawmill.h to uncomment the #define DEBUG 1 line, it will then spew detailed information to stdout)
Created attachment 19296 [details] Debug trace of sawfish being crashed by gmplayer
The symptoms when I generated this trace were slightly different. This time sawfish did appear to segfault. To run it and capture the log I removed the running version from gnome session manager and started the recompiled version from a terminal. I loaded Galeon then tried to run gmplayer.
can you try doing that again with sawfish from cvs? that crash should be fixed..
Created attachment 19305 [details] Debug trace from sawfish CVS
it's hard to tell what is happening, since I'm not sure which windows in that trace are being deleted wrongly. But it looks like the desktop window got taken out - the only explanation for that I can think of is that XConfigureWindow found a bad window in the sibling field, but returned an error with the good desktop window (even though the X server source code seems to do the right thing) does the patch I'm about to attach make any difference? if not, please describe as exactly as possible what you saw when generating the log (or generate another one if you can't remember). thanks.
Created attachment 19336 [details] [review] possible fix
Created attachment 19344 [details] Log of sawfish still crashing despite patch
Created attachment 19345 [details] gdb stack backtrace after sawfish's last crash
The following windows were open besides gnome panel: Nautilus: preferences:///Advanced Gnome Session configurator gnome-terminal gkrellm I ran gmplayer, which opened its main window, controls and font error box. The main window quickly disappeared. All windows stayed on screen, but lost their frames as sawfish segfaulted. I clicked OK on the gmplayer error and closed its control panel - it has its own close icon. gmplayer still showed up in the panel's window list, but had no windows visible. I couldn't get focus in any windows, even a new gnome-terminal. I tried repeating the experiment and the symptoms were different. There was no segfault and only gmplayer's main window disappeared, but so did the icons from the Nautilus backdrop, which I don't think has happened before.
Is this still proving impossible to fix? I can provide more log files created under different circumstances if it will help. I know how to prevent the problem in mplayer now, but I can't prevent it with short Galeon downloads, and I don't know of any suitable alternative window manager, so I'd really like a fix.
I'm seeing a similar problem in a Debian unstable configuration with xinerama. Using both gnome-panel and sawfish. For me though, it's xmms affecting rxvt's.. rxvt disappears but does not die. It's happened several times over a couple months but I haven't figured out how to reproduce it. Maybe this bug should be renamed to "disappearing windows" or something.
Closing Gaim can also hide GNOME Panels. Regarding comment 26, it seems to be when XMMS segfaults, as it did until recently when a running xmms instance was told from the command line to play some non-existant file. (That xmms bug seems to have been fixed.)
I have a similar problem. Several bug reports are out there under debian and ubuntu. I'm on debian etch with sawfish 1:1.3+cvs20061004-1. Here is a list of similar reports: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sawfish/+bug/49740 http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2003-August/020479.html http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=249891 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=208202
In sawfish 1.6.0 where have been two bugfixes regarding crashing/windows disappearing. This bug should be fixed now, if not feel free to re-open.