[SOLVED] kmail and akonadi crashes

[tomtom69]

I have 2 systems recently installed from scratch about some months ago, and both got kmail installed some weeks ago, which causes crashes at different situations.
There seem to be 2 issues which are already known and which (1) cause akonadi to crash on first startup and (2) kmail to crash when an email is opened on a separate window and this window is closed. I seem to suffer from these two bugs:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.c ... h-qt-5-12
Both bugs do not affect overall system stability, but they are annoying because one gets crash reports and needs to restart kmail.
Regarding the bug reports it looks like both issues are solved with kde-apps 18.12.
Q1: I have seen kmail-18.12.1 in portage. How can I contribute to testing this new version? (=how can I unmask it easily, how should I report issues, are there specific tests which I could help others with?)
Q2: Does anyone still use kmail with gentoo or am I the only one? (My family and me like kmail because it is easy to use, can open html emails without using an external browser, supports several identities, because it is "standalone" and not integrated into a browser-like application, supports drag-and-drop in KDE)

tom

[asturm]

Q1: I have seen kmail-18.12.1 in portage. How can I contribute to testing this new version?

kde overlay provides unmask files for that purpose. You don't have to actually add the overlay for that, you can download them manually (use the .keywords files): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/kde.git/ ... t_keywords

https://kde-bugs-dist.kde.narkive.com/z ... th-qt-5-12

The link makes it seem you would have to have Qt 5.12 for that, which is neither stable nor in Portage at this point (only available through qt overlay).

[tomtom69]

I overlooked qt5.12 (I have 5.11.3 installed).
However I unmasked and upgraded kde apps to 18.12.1 and did some testing at least on one of the 2 machines. I still have both segfaults.

Akonadi segfaults at first startup after system boot (when it asks for the kwallet password), and restarts automatically. The debug information is classified "useless":
https://pastebin.com/p32XUfE6
The segfault occurs in ~80% at startup after boot.

Kmail segfaults always when I open a message in a separate window (double click on the message in the list), and when I close this message windows. In about 50% of the cases it segfaults on closing kmail (with the same debug information). Debug information is also classified as "useless":
https://pastebin.com/9xzMejnA

Comparing the debug information I was led to the two bugs mentioned, however if these are fixed with 18.12 this seems to be a wrong conclusion.
One interesting fact is that both crashes only happen if the system is idle. If I start kmail on a heavily loaded system, both crashes did not appear yet.
Is there anything else I could try?

[asturm]

Stacktraces are always useless unless you install debug information: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Debugging

[tomtom69]

Thank you for the help.
I enabled debugging according to the instructions, and re-compiled kmail and the libraries that look involved with debug support. Now the crash information when closing a mail message from a separate kmail window is classified als "may be helpful":
https://pastebin.com/rf0wLjBg
I was not able to get into the source code when running kmail inside a gdb session yet, but I will try further to achieve this.
Because reproducing the akonadi crash takes more effort I started with the kmail segfault.
Is this more useful, or do I need to enable debugging for further packages?
My programming experience is more on an embedded uC level (no c++, no qt) , so it is hard for me to see what is going wrong.

[asturm]

To increase usefulness you would need to add debug info to qtwebengine as well, at least.

[tomtom69]

qtwebengine was already emerged with debug info
from /etc/portage/package.env/kde-debug:
dev-qt/qtwebengine debugsyms installsources

[tomtom69]

I did not succeed yet in getting gdb to show me the location where the segfault happens. gdb is able to start kmail and reports the segfault, but it doesn't show where the segfault happens:
https://pastebin.com/BcwqsYXc
Do I need to enable debugging on further libraries?

Because many issues are based on updated user profiles, I created a new user after the 18.12 update where I only set up keyboard layout and a test POP3 account on kmail. There is no difference when I use this newly created user profile.
Apart from this everything seems to work fine with the (not yet stabilized) kde-apps 18.12.

[tomtom69]

updated to kde-apps-18.12.2 but still the same.

[iandoug]

updated to kde-apps-18.12.2 but still the same.

FWIW since I updated on the weekend, I also have this problem, which is excessively annoying.

The bug report says it was fixed ....

Cheers, Ian

[tomtom69]

Yes, the bug report says it was fixed, but I also still have this problem.
Were you able to extract more debug information? I tried to get some, but I was not able to track down the problem to a specific library or code snippet - probably also due to my lack in c++ programming experience...

[iandoug]

Yes, the bug report says it was fixed, but I also still have this problem.
Were you able to extract more debug information? I tried to get some, but I was not able to track down the problem to a specific library or code snippet - probably also due to my lack in c++ programming experience...

Regret no. We've discussed it on the KDE-PIM user mailing list, and the bug has been re-opened.

I've tried to optimise the crashes by not closing messages, but rather reading a few at a time, and then closing one and letting it crash.

For replying, reply by right-clicking in the message list, rather than replying while the message is open, because that causes an immediate crash as well here.

Trust the devs will roll out the fix to stable as soon as it is available.

Cheers, Ian

[asturm]

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.g ... f4bb041e51

[iandoug]

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.g ... f4bb041e51

Working now, thanks a million

Cheers, Ian

[tomtom69]

Also works here (at least tested successfully on 2 machines).
Thanks a lot for fixing this! :-)

tom

[sokhapkin]

I resolved all akonadi-related problems recently in the most efficient way:

Code: Select all

USE=-pim

emerge thunderbird
emerge -uDn world
emerge --depclean

As a side effect I earned a lot of disk space and free RAM I was a loyal kmail user for more than 10 years. Not any more.

[albright]

I resolved all akonadi-related problems recently in the most efficient way:

kmail has a pretty face, but the beauty is only skin-deep (I keep using it - along with
thunderbird - however )

[tomtom69]

I also keep using kmail (and my family does also).
kmail itself now runs stable without crashes. What remains is the akonadi crash which appears often on first startup after system boot.
Because it happens only on first startup after boot, and because akonadi restarts itself it is by far not that annoying as the kmail crash was.
But I had the time to generate some debug information and investigate.
When akonadi crashes it leaves the following debug information

Code: Select all

Application: akonadi_control (akonadi_control), signal: Aborted
Using host libthread_db library "/lib64/libthread_db.so.1".
[Current thread is 1 (Thread 0x7f55d9b71780 (LWP 4862))]

Thread 2 (Thread 0x7f55d7126700 (LWP 4864)):
#0  0x00007f55df316163 in poll () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1  0x00007f55dd633837 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libxcb.so.1
#2  0x00007f55dd6355fa in xcb_wait_for_event () from /usr/lib64/libxcb.so.1
#3  0x00007f55d94d7630 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libQt5XcbQpa.so.5
#4  0x00007f55df6c3430 in QThreadPrivate::start(void*) () at thread/qthread_unix.cpp:361
#5  0x00007f55df201408 in start_thread () from /lib64/libpthread.so.0
#6  0x00007f55df32234f in clone () from /lib64/libc.so.6

Thread 1 (Thread 0x7f55d9b71780 (LWP 4862)):
[KCrash Handler]
#6  0x00007f55df254c44 in raise () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#7  0x00007f55df23e536 in abort () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#8  0x00007f55df68da4d in qt_message_fatal (context=..., message=<synthetic pointer>...) at global/qlogging.cpp:1901
#9  QMessageLogger::fatal (this=this@entry=0x7ffd6c3c0b90, msg=msg@entry=0x55e69fa45a58 "Cannot remove old log file '%s': %s") at global/qlogging.cpp:887
#10 0x000055e69fa11c0b in akInit (appName=...) at /usr/include/qt5/QtCore/qarraydata.h:208
#11 0x000055e69fa37da2 in AkApplicationBase::init() () at /usr/include/qt5/QtCore/qstring.h:829
#12 0x000055e69fa11e85 in AkApplicationImpl<QGuiApplication>::AkApplicationImpl (loggingCategory=..., argv=0x7ffd6c3c0ed8, argc=@0x7ffd6c3c0cec: 1, this=0x7ffd6c3c0d70) at /usr/include/qt5/QtCore/qscopedpointer.h:52
#13 main () at /usr/src/debug/kde-apps/akonadi-18.12.3-r1/akonadi-18.12.3/src/akonadicontrol/main.cpp:55
#14 0x00007f55df23fe9b in __libc_start_main () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#15 0x000055e69fa1254a in _start () at /usr/include/qt5/QtCore/qlogging.h:93

This looks very similar to the behaviour and debug information mentioned here

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1448691

I tried to remove the .old log files (permissions were OK, i could delete them as a normal user), but it did not take long for the akonadi crashes to reappear.

However I did not find any upstream bug for this.

[tomtom69]

I found out a little more.
There is a bug report existing at kde.org

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392092

When I start kmail in a terminal window I get the following output:

Code: Select all

Cannot rename log file '/home/tom/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi_control.error' to '/home/tom/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi_control.error.old': Cannot create /home/tom/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi_control.error.old for output
KCrash: Application 'akonadi_control' crashing...
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/lib64/libexec/drkonqi from kdeinit
sock_file=/var/run/user/1000/kdeinit5__0
Nouveau openGL driver detected. Qt WebEngine will disable usage of the GPU.
Note: you can set the QT_WEBENGINE_DISABLE_NOUVEAU_WORKAROUND
environment variable before running this application, but this is 
not recommended since this usually causes applications to crash as
Nouveau openGL drivers don't support multithreaded rendering
QDBusConnection: name 'org.kde.kwalletd5' had owner '' but we thought it was ':1.60'

This looked strange to me so I created an additional patch so see whether someting is wrong at the delete statements for the log files:

Code: Select all

--- a/src/shared/akdebug.cpp.a       2019-03-03 23:03:57.000000000 +0100
+++ b/src/shared/akdebug.cpp 2019-06-11 18:57:00.375941258 +0200
@@ -200,6 +200,8 @@ void akInit(const QString &appName)
     const auto errorLogFile = DebugPrivate::errorLogFileName(name);
     QFileInfo infoOld(errorLogFile + QLatin1String(".old"));
     if (infoOld.exists()) {
+       qCritical("Old log file '%s' exists. deleting...",qUtf8Printable(infoOld.fileName()));
         QFile fileOld(infoOld.absoluteFilePath());
+       qCritical("Old log file (complete) '%s' exists. deleting...",qUtf8Printable(fileOld.fileName()));
         const bool success = fileOld.remove();
         if (!success) {
@@ -207,6 +208,8 @@ void akInit(const QString &appName)
                 qUtf8Printable(fileOld.fileName()),
                 qUtf8Printable(fileOld.errorString()));
         }
+    } else {
+       qCritical("Old log file '%s' does not exist",qUtf8Printable(infoOld.fileName()));
     }
 
     QFileInfo info(errorLogFile);
@@ -219,7 +222,11 @@ void akInit(const QString &appName)
                    qUtf8Printable(file.fileName()),
                    qUtf8Printable(oldName),
                    qUtf8Printable(file.errorString()));
+        } else {
+         qCritical("log file '%s' renamed",qUtf8Printable(file.fileName()));
         }
+    } else {
+       qCritical("no log file to rename.");
     }
 
     QtMessageHandler origHandler = qInstallMessageHandler(akMessageHandler);

This patch resulted in some more output at first kmail startup after boot:

Code: Select all

Old log file 'akonadi_control.error.old' exists. deleting...
Old log file (complete) '/home/tom/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi_control.error.old' exists. deleting...
Cannot rename log file '/home/tom/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi_control.error' to '/home/tom/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi_control.error.old': Cannot create /home/tom/.local/share/akonadi/akonadi_control.error.old for output
KCrash: Application 'akonadi_control' crashing...
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/lib64/libexec/drkonqi from kdeinit
sock_file=/var/run/user/1000/kdeinit5__0
Nouveau openGL driver detected. Qt WebEngine will disable usage of the GPU.
Note: you can set the QT_WEBENGINE_DISABLE_NOUVEAU_WORKAROUND
environment variable before running this application, but this is 
not recommended since this usually causes applications to crash as
Nouveau openGL drivers don't support multithreaded rendering
QDBusConnection: name 'org.kde.kwalletd5' had owner '' but we thought it was ':1.53'

But at this point I do not have any more idea what could be wrong. The complete path for the file deletion looks OK, but for some reason a new file with the .old name can not be created.

Should I get an account at bugs.kde.org and share this information there, or is this too gentoo-specific or interfering with the package maintainer's work?

[asturm]

If you can rule out a local permissions issue then please definitely file a bug upstream, there's no interference whatsoever.

[tomtom69]

I added the debug output and description to the upstream bug report
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392092

[tomtom69]

The upstream bug report was updated with a patch
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392092
I can apply this patch to kde-apps/akonadi-18.12.3-r1 and it solves the problem.
So both crashed seem to be solved now, either by kde-apps-19.04 or the patches for akonadi/kmail :D
Thanks to everyone who supported this!

[asturm]

Thanks, I've added that fix in akonadi-18.12.3-r2!