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On 2018-03-21T19:12:56+00:00 Paul Worrall wrote:

Plasma 5.12.3 was working fine on Kubuntu 17.10 plus backports ppa

On upgrading to Kubuntu 18.04 beta, plasmashell crashes every login
leaving an empty black screen.

The only clues I can see are:

1. /home is an NFS share

2. .xsession-errors contains:

KActivities: Database can not be opened in WAL mode. Check the SQLite
version (required >3.7.0). And whether your filesystem supports shared
memory

followed by multiple reports of:
KActivities: FATAL ERROR: Failed to contact the activity manager daemon

Does NFS support shared memory?

If I unmount /home and use a local /home then all seems fine.

sqlite -version says 2.8.17

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/0

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On 2018-03-27T17:38:33+00:00 Paul Worrall wrote:

paul@desktop:~/.local/share/kactivitymanagerd/resources$ sqlite3 database
SQLite version 3.22.0 2018-01-22 18:45:57
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> pragma journal_mode;
Error: disk I/O error
sqlite> pragma journal_mode=wal;
Error: disk I/O error
sqlite>

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/5

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On 2018-03-28T19:27:04+00:00 Paul Worrall wrote:

Comment 1 was on 18.04 beta.

With 17.10 + Plasma 5.12.3 and the same NFS mounted /home:

paul@paul-BB-64004H:~/.local/share/kactivitymanagerd/resources$ sqlite3 database
SQLite version 3.19.3 2017-06-08 14:26:16
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> pragma journal_mode;
wal
sqlite> 

which seems to show that sqlite has a problem with NFS on 18.04 (which
has a different sqlite version)

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/6

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On 2018-03-28T21:33:13+00:00 Paul Worrall wrote:

As a work-around on 18.04: if I make the kactivitymanagerd/resources
directory a symlink to directory on the local (non-NFS) disk then plasma
does not crash.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/7

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On 2018-03-28T21:35:31+00:00 Rex Dieter wrote:


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 387979 ***

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/8

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On 2018-04-07T17:39:59+00:00 Paul Worrall wrote:

I do not think this is a duplicate of 387979:

1.  If I mount the same NFS share as /home on a Kubuntu 17.10 machine
all is well, so the database isn't corrupt.

2. deleting ~/.local/share/kactivitymanagerd/ doesn't help like it did
for 387979

3. this bug is manifest only if ~/.local/share/kactivitymanagerd/ is on
an NFS mounted folder (see comment 3

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/9

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On 2018-04-07T18:06:37+00:00 Rex Dieter wrote:

Strictly the fix is the same.  A crashing kactivitiesmanagerd will no
longer crash plasmashell.

Remaining issue: kactivitiesmanagerd is still (sometimes?) crashing (or
otherwise failing to start properly) when db is storged on nfs :(

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/10

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On 2018-04-23T17:31:02+00:00 Tibbs wrote:

I just wanted to add that it may be related to NFS, but there is also
something else involved which I don't yet understand.

Basically, I have a couple of hundred users all of which have ~ on NFS
and this problem occurs for only three of them.  I do not know what is
special about those three, nor have I figured out what I can delete to
get things to go back to normal.  The three users don't even have their
homes on the same NFS server, and other users are fine even when they
share the same NFS server or even the same volume on that server.  All
of the client machines have the same software: Fedora 27 with all
applied updates, which includes sqlite 3.20.1 and framesworks 5.44.0 and
plasma 5.12.4.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/11

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On 2018-04-23T17:57:33+00:00 Paul Worrall wrote:

@Jason Tibbits:  Is there any difference between users in the line in
fstab that mounts the NFS share, e.g. mount options?

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/12

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On 2018-04-23T18:20:38+00:00 Ivan-cukic-s wrote:

The NFS might be the problem - namely, from what I've read in sqlite3
docs, the 'shared memory' might not work on some NFSs. I'll probably
have to make Kamd disable the database (and everything that uses the
database - favourites, recent documents...) on nfs instead of it failing
to start.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/13

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On 2018-04-23T23:55:23+00:00 Tibbs wrote:

All user home directories are automounted and the mount options are
identical between users.

The problem with attributing this to NFS in general is that it does
appear to work most of the time.  I mean, I have always seen occasional
kactivitymanagerd crashes, and I've never been motivated to dig into
them, but only these three users it crashes in a tight loop; new
instances spawn and crash immediately and more instances are spawned in
their place which crash immediately and so on.  So much so that the
machines get quite slow from all of the IO writing core files to the
journal.  It wouldn't be so problematic if it just crashed at login and
stayed dead.

Really, NFS should be fine.  The only instances where you're going to
run into problems is when you're trying to do concurrent writes on an
NFS implementation where locking doesn't work.  The Linux NFS client and
server together should support what sqlite needs, and in case there's no
concurrency involved because there is access from only one client.  And
in any case, Firefox certainly doesn't have any problems with it and it
uses sqlite rather extensively.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/14

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On 2018-04-24T00:05:02+00:00 Tibbs wrote:

Also, the NFS version involved here is 4.2; NFS3 is not involved at all.
It shouldn't matter at all, but we use kerberized NFS (sec=krb5p) and
the servers are all running RHEL7.4.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/15

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On 2018-05-12T08:44:21+00:00 Paul Worrall wrote:

After receiving a recent update to Firefox it can't access it's
bookmarks.

Turns out ff uses an sqlite database for them, and symlinking the ff
profile directory to a local disk like I did for Kamd (comment 3)
'fixes' the problem.

It seems as though some recent change to sqlite or how it's used causes
problems with databases on NFS shares.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/16

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On 2018-05-14T16:04:16+00:00 Tibbs wrote:

Oh, great.  This is going to be absolutely terrible.

Does anyone have any reference to an upstream sqlite bug on this?  So
far I haven't found anything other than vague mentions that file locking
might be subtly broken on some platforms, but that should still only
cause problems if multiple processes are accessing the same database,
and then it would just result in some kind of database corruption and an
immediate failure when opening the database or setting WAL mode.  But
maybe sqlite changed to fail early and didn't update all of their
documentation.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/17

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On 2018-05-14T16:46:45+00:00 Tibbs wrote:

I chatted with some of the Linux NFS kernel developers and they know of
no problems with sqlite on NFS when used against a Linux server.  I did
find some documentation of problems with Solaris servers, but the
Firefox developers did get the "unix-excl" VFS pushed into upstream
sqlite a few years ago which does internal locking.  I'm not sure what
kactivitymanagerd is using.  (I searched the source but don't see
anywhere that might be set; I guess it's only using frameworks or qt
functions to interact with sqlite.)

I did some very basic testing to see that unix-excl locking works as
expected.  I also tested with a few sqlite versions (3.6.20 {doesn't
have WAL or unix-excl at all}, 3.7.17, 3.20.1 and 3.22.0) and none had
any particular problem opening or creating databases and setting the
journal_mode to WAL (except for 3.6.20 which simply doesn't support
WAL).

And I still can't find any statement of what's not supposed to work on
NFS.  All I can find is vague mentions that some NFS locking
implementations might be buggy, but nothing conclusive.  And honestly,
Plasma really does need to work (and be fully functional) with NFS home
directories.

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/18

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On 2018-07-23T08:47:03+00:00 Ivan-cukic-s wrote:

I guess you found the same things regarding NFS and sqlite as I did.

The symlink is a nice workaround. And one that I think is best suitable
for this situation.

Sadly, there is not much that can be done here:

1. Disable WAL which would completely kill the performance of sqlite and
still would not be a guarantee that everything would work on NFS

2. Replace sqlite with another database and deal with the new problems
that would arise from that (like nepomuk/baloo did quite a few times
without clear benefits)

Reply at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-
workspace/+bug/1758402/comments/19

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  plasmashell crashes on login. /home on NFS

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