Re: Help request: strange issue with xfce xfwm4 on AMD hardware, running head

On 28/05/23 00:42, Alastair Hogge wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Is there some way to test your X session with minimum components, and 
> slowly adding whatever XFCE does?

Maybe I was not perfectly clear. Xorg works fine, I already tested with 
another window manager.

The only thing that changed is that I updated to more recent head, 
updated a bunch of ports (none directly related to Xorg/DRI3) and xfwm4 
started crashing with the errors I reported. Everything else seems to 
work fine (except other xfce components that depend on xfwm4, which show 
various degrees of bad behavior caused by xfwm4 not running).

xfwm4 was NOT updated or reinstalled.

> 
> I would switch from using a X Display Manager, and launch X from the 
> login vty using startx (if not already ), with a minimum .xinitrc. I 
> would find out what is needed to get a minimal XFCE going, for example, 
> maybe just the Window Manager, no Compositor, or nothing at all to see 
> if X handles the display mode setting at all.

As I said this is something already easily tested. Everything works 
except xfwm4 crashes on startup if DRI3 is enabled.

I am reasonably sure xfwm4 would not crash if compiled without 
compositor support, since the crash happens in code that is protected by 
ifdefs and would be removed is disabling compositor.

That should would also not run if disabling the compositor, so I'm 
reasonably sure that would be another possible (but even uglier than 
disabling DRI3) workaround.

> 
> Also, where are your X logs? It is is normally at /var/log/X.something. 
> It this log empty after the crash?

As stated before I posted a bug report with xfce:

https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/-/issues/722

Please go there, there is the relevant line from .xsession-errors and a 
backtrace from the core file xfwm4 left behind.


As a further note, for my usage keeping DRI3 is not a problem, so if the 
only worry I had was to get working xfce on my laptop I would be finished.

What, instead, I'd like to try to understand is what is causing this and 
if it could affect more users in the future.

-- 
Guido Falsi <mad@madpilot.net>