plasma-desktop crashes but "strace plasma-desktop" works

[Duncan]

Werner posted on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:08:42 +0100 as excerpted:

> What is differend when I start plasma with "stace" ? What can I do to
> find out the problem ?

When you run thru strace, the tracing apparently slows the system down 
enough so it works fine, strongly suggesting that the problem is a race 
condition or the like, where two programs or threads of the same program 
try to access the same resource at the same time.  strace forces a 
slowdown and AFAIK some serialization of access, such that the problem 
disappears when using it.

This sort of disappearing problem is common when trying to debug race 
conditions or bad-optimization issues, and can be quite difficult to work 
around.  On Gentoo, a typical suggestion is to try compiling with standard/
generic optimizations (CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS at the standard "-march=native -O2 
-pipe") if the user has tweaked their CFLAGS beyond that, or possibly 
something lower still (reducing the -march to -mtune so it's using generic 
instruction code, and/or to -O1), basically forcing the system to go 
slower by using less optimization, altho the latter is considered a 
temporary work-around or debug-only solution, with a bug filing strongly 
recommended, since that's definitely pessimistic optimizations compared to 
the normal state of affairs, and there's a definite bug to be traced and 
fixed if that's required.

And bug filing is exactly what I'd recommend here, as you already seem to 
have tried the most obvious stuff, user config (.kde4), and the details of 
it working with amd64 but not x86 on the same repo are very intriguing.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.