I’m not sure what is going on. I don’t see any posts describing my problem, so I am going to assume it is limited to my machine. Possibly my SSD going bad?..
So last weekend’s updates 2/8/2020 - after which my Kmail started flaking out. Had been working fine since install. I would click on an email and poof, Kmail closed. Became so unusable I spent hours migrating to Thunderbird. OK, I can chalk that up to maybe a bad update. I since like Thunderbird so much more anyway.
Fast forward to this weekend’s updates which I only installed on 2/13/2020. Now Vivaldi browser opens, blinks, a few seconds later blinks again, repeats this 3 or 4 times, then poof - gone. OK, Vivaldi had an update in the latest batch of updates. So let’s downgrade. Same issue. OK, so lets uninstall and reinstall. Uninstall works fine. Reinstall I select Vivaldi (in YAST), hit apply, and poof - YAST installer disappears. What the? OK, try it again, same result. OK, reboot, try it again, SAME RESULT.
Now I’m thinking something is seriously gone wrong with my machine. What’s not going to work next?..Is it just incompatible software with my video card? It’s an old Lenovo T410 with a samsung evo 860 ssd. I really don’t want to wipe and start over - only to have the same issue after all current updates are applied. I’m at a loss as to what to do next…
@sheydayi:
Do you have a Btrfs system partition?
Has the Btrfs housekeeping been executing as expected?
Does “btrfs filesystem df /” indicate any low space issues?
The system is on BTRFS, and it is showing 53% full…
Should be OK – try sequentially starting the systemd “btrfs-balance” and “btrfs-scrub” services.
You have an SSD – therefore, after the Btrfs housekeeping has completed, you should also start the “btrfs-trim” service.
OK, now I am on the machine and able to run commands. While the free space is 53%, running the btrfs filesystem df / now has me worried:
Data, single: total=21.00 GiB, used=20.04GiB
System, single: total=32.00Mib, used=16.00KiB
Metadata, single: total=1.25Gib, used 927.7Mib
GlobalReserve, siingle: total 58.19mIb, used 0.0B
So it looks like the Data is getting a bit full. How do I fix that? Can I delete things? Do I have to resize it somehow? This is all new to me…
OK, thanks for educating me on the BTRFS commands. I have never thought I needed to run any kind of clean up periodically. It looks scary that I only have a little more Data space available, but now I see that it seems to be dynamically allocating based on need, so that’s not actually a problem. I have 40Gb available and it’s only using 22Gb. But, it turns out that’s not my problem. I dug a little deeper now that I had time, and was able to reinstall Vivaldi from the website download, rather than thru YAST. Maybe there was a repository issue - who knows. Anyway, it continues to crash. So I opened my system log and found these lines every time Vivaldi “Blinked”:
2/15/20 9:18 AM kernel VizCompositorTh[6515]: segfault at 962 ip 000056276c91b006 sp 00007f6b7daa7100 error 6 in vivaldi-bin[562768849000+71ff000]
2/15/20 9:18 AM kernel VizCompositorTh[6576]: segfault at 9a9 ip 000055cc5bf7b006 sp 00007f60b0bb4100 error 6 in vivaldi-bin[55cc57ea9000+71ff000]
2/15/20 9:18 AM kernel VizCompositorTh[6647]: segfault at 9f1 ip 000055b54d3dc006 sp 00007f4d3c77c100 error 6 in vivaldi-bin[55b54930a000+71ff000]
2/15/20 9:19 AM kernel VizCompositorTh[6656]: segfault at 9fa ip 0000557c7affe006 sp 00007f329a5a3100 error 6 in vivaldi-bin[557c76f2c000+71ff000]
2/15/20 9:19 AM kernel VizCompositorTh[6679]: segfault at a11 ip 0000561745d48006 sp 00007f8e27c63100 error 6 in vivaldi-bin[561741c76000+71ff000]
2/15/20 9:19 AM kernel VizCompositorTh[6689]: segfault at a1b ip 0000563d7ce80006 sp 00007f33c5aee100 error 6 in vivaldi-bin[563d78dae000+71ff000]
With the final line when it disappeared:
2/15/20 9:19 AM kernel traps: Chrome_IOThread[6482] trap int3 ip:5572a9bd0e1d sp:7f8669536760 error:0 in vivaldi-bin[5572a75f1000+71ff000]
So a little searching, and I found this:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=307542
Which seems to describe my issue. I also run ESET antivirus. It’s not clear from these posts if ESET is the culprit or Chrome, so I still have some digging to do. Was it a kernel update that is now incompatible? Not sure, but more likely the way Vivaldi has been updated with the latest Chrome features underneath.
So why did Kmail **** out last week? Hmmm…When I clicked on an email and it crashed, perhaps that email had web content and it was trying to launch a chrome process thru my default browser which was Vivaldi… or it was a totally unrelated fault - I’m not sure it’s worth reinstalling to investigate.
So I guess we can call the mystery solved, but not the problem and how to fix it.