ET segfaults

Decade · Post by **Decade** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 10:00 am

In the last weeks Enemy territory has started to segfault very frequently on my gentoo box, usually after 5 or 10 minutes of playing.
I spent the whole weekend trying to investigate the reason; thinking it was an overheating problem (it seems that the problem got worse with hotter weather), i restored the original clock to my cpu (it was slightly overclocked), and even tried to play with the cpu at half its normal clock; I replaced my ram with a spare 256 megs ram stick I had, in case it was faulty; I replaced my geforce 6600 gt with an old fx 5200 with lower power compsumption (it doesn't even have a fan) since somebody told me that maybe the overheated graphics card was stealing power from the cpu/ram and causing the segfaults; finally I tried a clean installation of gentoo stable branch on another partition.
None of these attempts seemed to have an effect on the segfaults

and the point is that ET is the only program that segfaults, and this incudes other games (quake 4), and hours and hours of consecutive compiling programs/kernels (for example those needed to make the clean gentoo installation). The only think I can still try is to ask a friend of mine to install ET on his Windows pc and see if it segfaults just because of my presence

Any suggestion?

WeblionX · Post by **WeblionX** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 10:10 am

The power supply it self could be going bad, causing low/high voltages or even putting out "dirty" or "noisy" power. Though as to why it just happens to ET, it could either be a coincidence, or ET is using something that no other program is using.

Decade · Post by **Decade** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 10:46 am

WeblionX wrote:The power supply it self could be going bad, causing low/high voltages or even putting out "dirty" or "noisy" power. Though as to why it just happens to ET, it could either be a coincidence, or ET is using something that no other program is using.

Yeah, that's what I tought too: maybe when both the graphics card and the cpu are under heavy usage, with the fans going 100%, the power supply goes in trouble and this would explain why it affects only ET and not the compiler. Guess I'll have to try a long session at quake 4 and see if it eventually segfaults too...

ReyalP · Post by **ReyalP** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 12:44 pm

PB ? I've found PB on linux usually segfaults until you run pb setup.

Decade · Post by **Decade** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 1:20 pm

I just played more than 30 minutes with a clean .etwolf directory (default config) and it didn't crash.

ReyalP wrote:PB ? I've found PB on linux usually segfaults until you run pb setup.

You mean pbweb.x86? Could be the case since it's in the .etwolf directory.

EDIT: looks like using pbweb didn't solve the problem. It's either some cvar in my config, or some downloaded pk3 that makes me segfault.

WeblionX · Post by **WeblionX** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 3:31 pm

You could try moving all pk3s in etmain (Except for the ones that come with ET) to another directory and see if it happens on a regular map. I'd also suggest testing with both etmain and ETPro.

ReyalP · Post by **ReyalP** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 3:49 pm

a crashdump might give a hint

Set b_crashlogpath and post the contents or a link to it.

Decade · Post by **Decade** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 6:05 am

Hmm I couldn't manage to get a crashdump. I started et with +set b_crashlogpath /home/alex and didn't fid any log in that dir after the crash.

Anyways this is getting pretty tiring. Change something in cfg, play for an hour to see if it crashes, change something else, repeat. Today I played for another hour with default cfg, (including blood flash, view bobbing, no hitsounds and default crosshair

) and it's now pretty safe to say that it doesn't crash. But when I executed the cfg that contains my binds and my scripts (not settings, only binds and scripts), the game crashed again. So at the moment I think the culprit is not pb, not a pk3, not a cvar but a bind or a script. Meanwhile I can't play clanwars (well I could, with default cfg)

Deus · Post by **Deus** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 6:40 am

can u post this cfg?

ReyalP · Post by **ReyalP** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 12:34 pm

It is very hard to believe there is some .cfg option that makes your ET crash after hours of play. Far more likely it is something wrong with your hardware, and it only happened not to come up when you were playing with default cfg. Or running in the default config doesn't trigger that fault somehow. I suppose it could also be an issue with some library or your kernel too...

PB crashes tend to be in a few minutes.

Hardware crashes can be very strange. I've had failing hardware that would only crash the server on a certain point of a certain map.