Dear KDE-from-SVN user,
A new an interesting breed of crash in libtaskmanager came to light today and I spent the day (that was supposed to be spent on other things, but oh well) fixing it up. The change set was not .. small. However, the crashes are gone.
Unfortunately We are dangerously close to the tagging of 4.3rc1, and I'm hoping that lots of you can update kdebase/workspace/, give it a rebuild and let me know if anything is looking off in your tasks widget with your configurations. Normally I'd go through and test as many as I can, but with time this short, I'm appealing to the masses to do that "many eyes" thing with me using the biggest bullhorn I have at my disposal. :)
If you do run into troubles with current svn, please let me know ASAFP so I might be able to fix it for rc1.
Of course, if I hear nothing back, that will be good news. :)
Thanks.
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12 comments:
After recompiling from trunk, plasma stopped crashing... I'm using it since more than one hour and all seems working fine. :-) :-) :-)
Never speak if all is going great... after posting my previous comment, plasma crashed..
#5 TaskManager::GroupManager::manualSortingRequest (this=0x0, taskItem=0x1790810, newIndex=2) at /home/test/src/kdebase/workspace/libs/taskmanager/groupmanager.cpp:363
I'm going to report the full backtrace on b.k.o.
No breakage for me. (haven't had any crashes before, so I can't comment on that)
I've been using Windows 7 for last few weeks, until this weekend when I bought a new Nvidia card, in big part because I wanted a smooth KDE4 experience. Before that I had an ATI Radeon X800 card with xorg drivers and KDE4 just doesn't play with that (freezing, crashing, slow etc.).
With nvidia it's much smoother, BUT there are a few issues and I thought I'll briefly outline them here. It's possible you've already encountered some and fixed in RC..
1. Plasma artifacts. Just see this for a sample of screenshots. This happens fairly often. It almost sometimes feels like I'm swimming in plasma and so its waves are kinda distorting the desktop. :P
2. A bug I accidentally discovered right when I uploaded the above screenshots. It is evident in the file names of all but one of those screenshots (these "file:⁄⁄⁄.." names). I didn't name files like that, it somehow just happened as I was uploading them via SSH using Dolphin).
3. This is a long standing issue that's been recurring from release to release. Wherever KDE4 has to list enough stuff to fill up the whole window scrolling becomes sluggish and resizing even more sluggish (choppy even). This happens in such things as Amarok playlists and internet radio station lists, Kate when there is many files open (resizing the sidebar), Quassel (especially when the window is full of conversations, it's so sluggish it takes a couple of seconds to send a message), and various other places where lists are involved).
4. Still lacking performance of some desktop effects. My nvidia card can run Crysis at high settings fairly smoothly, and somehow things like magic lamp effect for minimizing windows still doesn't feel very smooth. This combined with above give KDE4 a generally "heavy" feeling, making it feel sluggish.
5. In KDE4.3 beta2 it seems there might have been a regression regarding the way dolphin handles SSH connections.. it seems like it's reconnecting every time I leave it idle for only a few minutes and then does it in such a way that it feels slow (plus the notifications keep popping up from the panel every time, which gets annoying). This used to be very smooth, even if it does reconnect, it did it fast and without being in my face about it.
6. Sound in VLC stopped working after a relogin today, which could be a VLC issue, but it worked before.. I'm mentioning it because it does tend to happen sometimes that sound in KDE fails, reverting to a fallback (between pulseaudio and alsa I suppose) which feels dirty.. so who knows what could be happening there..
Well that's all I can think off right now. I seem to encounter weird issue every now and then, and then forget them, but if the above could possibly be fixed I think 4.3 would qualify as a "wow" release. I love where it's going and I am not looking forward to going back to GNOME. KDE4 is the future.
Thanks
@libervisco:
Some of those are rather offtopic for this blog, which was hoping to identify newly-introduced regressions in the Task Manager stuff :)
Have you reported those bugs, BTW? I've heard other people mention the "file://" bug but don't know if there's a report for it. If there isn't, please file one - I'd class it as a pretty severe issue which should really be fixed before 4.3 is released.
Ah my bad SSJ. I didn't report yet, though I searched for some last night.
I'm gonna try kde-nightly from Project Neon (kubuntu) and see if some of this stuff still happens and then search/report bugs.
@libervisco:
Awesome :)
@FiNeX: thanks for the report on bugs.kde.org; it's fixed in svn now.
btw, same problem would have been there in earlier revisions as well, but would "work" sometimes because the memory location of the recently deleted object may not get immediately overwritten. iow, luck of the draw.
with the changes i made, the lifetime of the objects are at least accurately tracked, so when we see that this=0x0 we know exactly what happened: the grouping strategy was changed and the groupManager removed on us.
so now it will fail every time we make this kind of "access after delete" change but with a clear signature of the problem. should make it easier in future to root out these kinds of problems should they pop up again.
@libervisco:
1) is a graphics driver issue; nvidia works very well now, but sometimes needs some tweaks to the configuration. i think there is some info on this on userbase.kde.org even?
2) if you can figure out how to reproduce that one, pls file a report on bugs.kde.org. obviously incorrect behaviour there :)
3) that's likely a Qt, and even more likely a Qt<->x.org interaction, issue
4) yes, performance (sometimes even just perceived performance) in some of the desktop effects plugins needs improving, but every release seems to be getting better there
5) sounds like a regression indeed; i haven't noticed this myself (and i use fish:// fairly often) but if you're seeing it you should report is. is this with fish:// or sftp://? that is important for the report.
6) that's not a KDE issue. something to send to your distribution, really.
and yes, kind of off-topic for this blog entry ;) look forward to your testing and reports on bugs.kde.org, though. if you can, please use pre-releases / betas / rc's since feedback during those helps make the actual releases much more solid.
preventative versus repairing-after-the-fact :)
Thanks Aaron.
[offtopic] (just to finish it)
1st one turned out to happen only when the blur effect was enabled (which I can definitely do without, it's a luxury). Looks like that's already in buzilla.
2nd I couldn't reproduce so far. :S Right now it just seems like it might have been some sort of a freak accident partly related to problem 5, which somehow ended up copying the full paths into file names. In kde-nightly from Neon Project (KDE) dolphin wont even connect, but I suspect this could be a missing component in Neon.
3rd and 4th OK. :)
5th: whichever (sftp or fish) is used by default when you "Add new network". I'm gonna check this out tonight again and then report if it happens again.
Looks like I only have one (5th) potential bug report now, unless I manage to reproduce 2nd issue above. Which is I'd good news. :)
Oh and yeah I later found in bugzilla the link to userbase.kde.org regarding video tweaks and tried xrender on kde-nightly and it improved resizing on most windows. :)
[/offtopic]
Alright, I wont pollute this thread anymore. :)
Cheers
@libervisco and others:
bug 2 and bug 5 have been already reported.
@aaron: thanks, I've already seen the fix and now plasma doesn't crash anymore :-)
No crashes, but:
My task manager is completely empty (on both of my desktops) right now, even though I have multiple apps running on either desktop. This happened suddenly, it was showing my apps just a minute ago.
This has happened for the first time. I checked out and compiled kdelibs, plasma-workspace, kwin, plasma-runtime and plasma-apps this morning (1am CET).
Nevermind, problem solved my reinstalling libtaskmanager.
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