Bug 177417 – x11-misc/googleearth-4 crashes X server with i810 driver when DRI is turned off

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED CANTFIX

[Description Martin von Gagern 2007-05-07 08:52:09 UTC]

Due to another problem I had Option "DRI" "False" in the xorg.conf section for my i915 graphics chip. As a result, my X server crashed reproducibly whenever I started googleearth.

Some time ago my DRI was disabled not due to that option but because my VideoRAM setting was too low. In that case I experienced no crashes with googleearth.

The problem exists with xf86-video-i810 both 1.7.4 and 2.0.0.
Otherwise my system is ~x86, with googleearth-4 and xorg-server-1.3.0.0.

[Comment 1 Martin von Gagern 2007-05-07 08:53:53 UTC]

Created attachment 118411 [details]
Xorg log with xf86-video-i810-2.0.0

This log contains the backtrace of the crash and some additional information.

[Comment 2 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2007-05-07 09:03:00 UTC]

There's no way for us to fix closed-source stuff such as googleearth. You'll need to take this to Google.

[Comment 3 Stefan Schweizer (RETIRED) 2007-05-07 09:11:33 UTC]

Does it also crash with glxgears? I suppose this bug is in the gfx driver/config - otherwise you need to talk to google about fixing it. As said we cannot fix closed source.

[Comment 4 Martin von Gagern 2007-05-07 10:10:32 UTC]

Created attachment 118413 [details]
tail of strace googleearth

(In reply to comment #3)
> Does it also crash with glxgears?

No, it does not.

> I suppose this bug is in the gfx
> driver/config - otherwise you need to talk to google about fixing it. As said
> we cannot fix closed source.

If it were only googleearth crashing, I'd completely agree. But it is my understanding that the X server should never crash, no matter what a client application does. So I consider this a bug in X.org, and with the backtrace and me being able to reproduce the issue, it should be possible to pin this down.

I attached the tail of an strace run of googleearth. I stripped a lot of futex calls, and before this part there was a lot of app loading and splash screen stuff. File descriptor 3 is the X.org socket. I don't speak the X11 protocol, but I got all occurences of keywords like "dri", "glx", "mesa" included in this trace. It should be possible to determine what googleearth is telling the X.org server to make it crash.

Is there some better way to intercept X communications and maybe even decode and classify messages? Something like wireshark only for X11 sockets instead of NICs?

[Comment 5 Martin von Gagern 2007-05-07 10:30:36 UTC]

Reported in the Google Earth for Linux Help forum as well:
http://groups.google.com/group/earth-linux/browse_thread/thread/0995d4b5bc7157e6