Odd kde 4.10.5 bug i think.

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Okay i have been pulling my hair out at this for about a week now.
Last stable kde update kde crashed.
And by crash i mean 'everything' disappeared on screen except for the program i had in focus at that moment which was hexchat.
Okay i had kde crash like this before.
So i restarted the computer.
All files outside of directory's inside my home directory and hidden files ONLY minus three files i access through nfs(checking and savings spreadsheets and a short story i am writing) are GONE.
Okay not a good sign, so i restore all that from a backup.
Next reboot, all those files except the ones written into the directory's and said three files are gone again.
Okay REALLY not a good sign.
So I rush over to my local neighborhood best buy, the closest and not hard to get to computer store and pick up a normal laptop hard drive considering my venture into ssd-hood a failure after less than a year.
One night of moving the system over and restoring the backup along with one reboot later and... The files disappear again.
Then I change file systems from ext4 to jfs and then back to the ssd.
Same story, files go bye bye.
That is until i log into Xfce4 and transfer the files with thunar.. they stay through multiple reboots and they continue to stay until the kde services system crashes(i use kmail) at which point those specific files in that specific location all vanish.

I would post console output and such but I have not a clue on what or where to look for on this particular issue..

CkoTuHa · n00b Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 74

l33t, lol.

Get the latest stable gentoo, bootstrap, roll over stg3, emerge world put your home directory.

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

CkoTuHa · n00b Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 74

What a response..."Only noobs ...[snip]...would...[snip]" - this gives away the insecurity behind your post.
Why so categorical, mate ? We are not trying to prove a theorem here, are we ?

Don't take this personally, but I will dig into this one just a little bit more just because of the reminiscence.
You see, I was just like you many years ago - fresh out of school, insecurely categorical, quick to judge and not very mature.
The last remark applies in more than one way. What I mean is that you display lack of so called "mathematical maturity".
Better find some time and work on it since you display all the characteristics of lack of maturity such as: sloppy reasoning, not being able to see the main idea, missing the points, lack of abstract reasoning skills and rather poor judgment.

This is not the best place to argue, but since you bothered to reply in the first place :

Firstly, you say that it is "easier" ? Could you define easier ? You see, for instance, I find it much easier to start with a guaranteed sane environment - stable packages, "minimal" required USE flags and then, roll over your updates and import your settings as needed. For, it is safe to assume that once you've done those you alleviate much of other possible edge cases.

You might say "Why do it ?".
Look at the scenario truekaiser is describing. What kind of KDE component upgrade would wipe significant part of files, if not all of them, from your home dir ? Have you seen such cases ?
Most of the time, after minor kde upgrades you get an application or two that is messed up and because it can not import the existing settings. Surely, that is not what truekaiser is describing. I find it very atypical for minor kde upgrade to shred files in your home dir right and left. This alone, in my book, begs a closer look into the system. How do you know it has not been compromised or tampered with ?

Yeah, so much for case analysis. But that is not all. How do you know for sure that the user got his stack in canonical way in the first place ? How do you know that he didn't clone it from the other system ? How do you know that the original system was not compiled with specific flags for a bit different target ?

Secondly, you do realize this board is created for practical reason, which is, to help users help each other. Don't you see that it is rather "safe" & "conservative" to assume from the description of the behavior of the system truekaiser describes that there is something really strange going on ? Don't you think that it is reasonable to think there is something fundamentally borked up there ? Lastly, don't you think it is rather reasonable on my side to assume as less as possible and suggest what I would do with teh system ? I believe it is quite irrefutable that my suggestions are quite reasonable. Perhaps, just maybe, they seem a bit unnecessary. But I ask you - what would you give for a system that you can have reasonable trust in ? This is up for each of us to decide for ourselves.

I am sorry I got this far off-topic here. But in any case

ps: please note, that the way you use "advice" as a verb is wrong. It should be "advise" since this is the proper verb-form.

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

The "noob" was a direct response to your "l33t, lol,". Your reaction showed that you did not like to get called noob, so think twice before you lough at other people. (and it was intentional, btw...)

The fact here: running kde breaks the system, xfce does not. So the breakage seems to be not that fundamental.
Moving config files to a different place is WAY faster then setting up a completely new system (even with worldfile in place). Testing with a sane default config should always be the first thing to try.
The "facts" about file deletions:
1) kget did it
2) dolphin did it
3) nepomuk is known to not work with $HOME over nfs. Just because he mentioned "nfs", and you never know about side effects.
4) And probably he simply downloaded a malicious addon from kde-look.org (or a "friend" installed it as a "joke"). You never know about that.
-> the first to points were resolved by a new version, in any case such things will NOT magically get solved by reinstalling the same version again and again, even with a "clean" new setup. 3) will never work. 4) will be resolved by empty .kde4/.config/...

And having a broken software stack will more likely result in crahes or 100% CPU/memory consumption. Of course there might be cases where bad memory access will trigger file deletions, but that should be definitely VERY deep (gcc/glibc/...) and likely result in similar symptoms when running xfce.

CkoTuHa · n00b Joined: 27 Mar 2009 Posts: 74

truekaiser make sure you are not suffering from this nasty thing.

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

@truekaiser:
If trying a new user/config doesn't help:
Some additional informations might be good:
* How is your system partitioned? (partitions, FS type, mount point)
* some special setup like RAID?
* Your kernel version you RUN (uname -r)
* emerge --info
* The packages you installed before you first got this issue (qlop -l - qlop comes with portage-utils)
* Do you regularly run updates? Or was there a greater timespan you skipped updating?
* Do you run etc-update/dispatch-conf/... after each update?
* revdep-rebuild?
* Do you use some "strange" Overlays or third-party-ebuilds in your local overlay?

Are there other things you realise? Strange sound, heat, ...
(It MIGHT be a general defect (SATA-Controller etc), and you simply hit it because of kdes heavy nepomuk indexer/akonadi/... that stresses I/O.)

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

@5: An update usually pulls in more than just kde

Might be there were other packages updated, too, that's why I asked.
I also assume you are running stable, so no packages from "testing" get installed.

Your VIDEO_CARDS suggest you run an AMD video card. Could you try to to change your xorg.conf to not use fglrx but vesa?
You also might want to test eselect opengl to change your opengl implementation.
(just in case there is a hardware problem with your GPU or a driver bug that get's triggered - even if "kde services" don't directly start kwin+compositor).

You say you use kmail2. So starting kmail from within xfce also makes your desktop crash + files get deleted?
What happens if you start systemsettings and completely disable nepomuk before launching kmail2?

As it seems you have more then one HD, you might want to try a completely fresh install - just to confirm this is NOT a hardware problem.
I don't like hiding issues that way but find the root of the issue...

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

Just forgot:
Does dmesg log something unusual?
What about Xorg.0.log? ~/.xsession-errors?
The steam overlay suggests you run steam games. Do they run fine from within xfce?
Is you /usr/local/ empty, or can you find some files there? (esp. in lib/ and bin/ subdirs)

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

1. I look over updates before letting them compile. this one was just kde.
2. i only have one hard drive since this system is a laptop. the numbers beside sda are partition numbers.
3. /usr/local is not empty.
4. I would have to re-trigger the error to get the Xorg.0.log and i won't have time for that kind of messing around till the weekend.
5. Upon further searching I think it might be a regression of this bug here. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127894
6. will have to grab it after re triggering it this weekend. edit: and find a place to post it as it is larger than the post size limit.