Subject: Thunderbird causing system crash, need guidance
Gary Aitken
garya at nightmare.dreamchaser.org
Mon Dec 11 01:12:01 UTC 2017
Hi all,
Looking for guidance diagnosing a system crash caused by
attempting to start Thunderbird.
10.3-RELEASE-p20 FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p20 #0: Wed Jul 12 03:13:07
UTC 2017 root at amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr
/src/sys/GENERIC amd64
After running flawlessly for over a month, I started having
sluggish behavior. Since this is a known problem with firefox
56, I exited and restarted it several times over the course of a
few days. Then yesterday (2017-12-08) the system hung and
crashed.
I have narrowed the cause down to Thunderbird 52.4.0, or at least
something associated with it.
The system + X seem to still run fine; openoffice, firefox, gimp.
When I attempt to start t-bird the cursor disappears almost
immediately, followed by a long wait with the display apparently
frozen, and then results in a crash and reboot.
It seems t-bird should crash/dump core without crashing the
system if it was just a t-bird problem, even if it's a bad binary
image?
I originally had crash dumps disabled, so changed
dumpdev="NO" to "AUTO" in rc.conf
but still no dump in /var/crash
only thing in /var/crash is minfree, which says "2048"
At reboot, I see the message
"No suitable dump device was found"
so presumably that is the cause of the missing dump.
It may be my sys config, as /tmp and swap are memdisks.
The disk has no swap or tmp partition; I'm not sure how or if I
can modify fstab or the config to get swap on disk for a dump.
>From fstab:
/dev/ufs/hd250G1root / ufs rw,noatime 1 1
/dev/ufs/hd250G1var /var ufs rw,noatime 2 2
/dev/ufs/hd250G1usr /usr ufs rw,noatime 7 3
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,mode=01777 0 0
md99 none swap sw,file=/usr/swap/swap,late 0 0
/var is 16G
It seems like it may be corrupted disk data, but I'm wondering if
there's a good way to diagnose that.
In ~/.thunderbird/xxx.default (profile) directory, the last date
on a file is the "lock" symlink, from (I think) the first crash.
Other files show times 27 min earlier, which may be the last time
t-bird semi-successfully started up.
Interestingly, deleting the "lock" symlink and attempting to
restart t-bird results in the "lock" symlink being recreated with
the same (old!) timestamp, Dec 8 21:08.
There's a chance this is caused by an incompatible library;
I've rebuilt and updated several ports over the past month, and I
don't know if I restarted t-bird during that period.
But again, I would expect t-bird to crash but not the system.
Any and all thoughts welcome.
Thanks,
Gary
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