On Sat, May 06, 2017 at 09:56:12AM +0200, Peter N. M. Hansteen wrote:
> I have a weird problem here that I don't quite know how to debug.
>
> On my laptop, which tends to run the latest amd64 snapshot or one
> that's at most a few days old, the following sequence of events will,
> approximately one out of ten times, kill my X:
>
> $ soffice fehfeh.csv &
>
> where fehfeh.csv is the kind of file that went into the data for my pop3
> password groper columns - available via the blog referenced in my
> .signature and just browsing for the obvious keywords)
>
> Then selecting a column (the username column) and using the Column Type
> dropdown to select Text typefor the column.
>
> Then we have a black, empty screen for a moment and then the xenodm
> login dialog box reappears.
>
> The most annoying thing here is that there is never an soffice.core
> file, although other processes that were active at the time may leave
> core files. This last time around it looks like only emacs was killed in
> such a way that it left a corefile:
>
> [Sat May 06 09:50:22] peter@elke:~$ ls -ltr *core
> -rw------- 1 peter peter 1528700960 May 5 22:56 firefox.core
> -rw------- 1 peter peter 56259040 May 6 09:25 emacs-25.2.core
>
> (the firefox.core here is too old to be relevant here).
>
> So the question is, of course: How do I go about usefully debugging this?
>
I saw it too. But as I try to avoid using LibreOffice, it doesn't hurt
me too much :-)
If the problem is in X server (which die, and kill all X apps in the
same time), soffice will not generate a coredump. X server program
should, but as it is a special program (suid, privsep, ...), it doesn't.
/usr/xenocara/README describes the way to get a core file for X server.
to resume:
- makes the system to generate coredump for suid programs
(kern.nosuidcoredump=2)
- makes Xorg to not catch signal and die as any other program
(NoTrapSignals option in xorg.conf)
- don't use privsep for X
(starting X with -keepPriv)
- makes X server to crash
(playing with LibreOffice and CSV ?)
- look at /var/crash and profit
--
Sebastien Marie
