There are a number of bug reports on launchpad that relate to crashes in xfce4-session with SIGSEGV in g_spawn_sync(). The first one dates back to early 2007 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4-session/+bug/117017) and there has been two lately with Xfce 4.6 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4-session/+bug/345111 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4-session/+bug/345187). A fourth bug, also filed recently, reports a crash in malloc and due to the backtrace being so similar I figured I'd mention it here in case it is related (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4-session/+bug/355805). Unfortunately, no data is available on how to reproduce. StacktraceTop: #0 do_exec (child_err_report_fd=28, stdin_fd=-1, stdout_fd=-1, stderr_fd=-1, #1 0x00007f1b16b27dfc in fork_exec_with_pipes (intermediate_child=0, #2 0x00007f1b16b28a1b in IA__g_spawn_sync ( #3 0x000000000041461e in xfsm_manager_handle_failed_properties ( #4 0x00000000004187ae in xfsm_startup_handle_failed_startup ( #5 0x0000000000418865 in xfsm_startup_timeout (data=<value optimized out>) #6 0x00007f1b16af183b in g_timeout_dispatch (source=0x2306290, callback=0, #7 0x00007f1b16af10ca in IA__g_main_context_dispatch (context=0xb40710) #8 0x00007f1b16af47a0 in g_main_context_iterate (context=0xb40710, block=1, #9 0x00007f1b16af4c6d in IA__g_main_loop_run (loop=0xb7e550) #10 0x00007f1b1975aa07 in IA__gtk_main () #11 0x000000000040bf47 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fff22e148b8) at main.c:299 Please see the launchpad bugs and their attachments for the other backtraces.
Added some additional checks for this in 8855cf9. If there is a way to reproduce or people who frequently have this, they can set the environment variable XFSM_VERBOSE=1, which will dump information about what the session manager is doing, that would be very helpful.
We are seeing these in Fedora as well. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=572309 and the backtraces at: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=399170 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=406296 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=407136 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=417874 I'll try and get folks to try the suggestion in comment 1.
Reassign to xfce-bugs@xfce.org.
Can someone still reproduce this with 4.8? We never got the detailed log asked by Nick.
Let's assume this was fixed as we did not get any feedback.