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Game apparently crashed but I can't get out of it ?


LienRag
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Hi all.

I'm testing the Asteria mod on 0ad KenWood without problems for a few days, but on Friday it seemingly crashed after a woman was killed by enemy fire (I still have the mouse pointer but it has shapes not seen before for the game, and I can't click on anything).

Problem is I can find no way to get out of the game fullscreen to access the other windows on my Debian Mate computer (on Bullseye).

Alt - Tab isn't working, neither do Alt F4 nor  Alt Shift L (to lock the Mate session).

I can open a console with ctrl alt F1 and with htop I see that the RAM is quite busy but not saturated (11 Gb occupied on a total of 16, and around 1 Gb of swap used).

What is surprising is that I don't find any process that I can relate to 0ad : what is the name of the processes that I should be searching for ?

Trying to launch 0ad on another computer I find a process named pyrogenesis something something, so on the stuck computer I trie killall -9 pyrogenesis but I get  "aucun processus trouvé" (no process found).

I also tried killall -9 mate-session but to no avail either.

Is there a way out of it ?

(except shutting the computer down, as there is unsaved work on the other windows)

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22 hours ago, LienRag said:

I can open a console with ctrl alt F1 and with htop I see that the RAM is quite busy but not saturated (11 Gb occupied on a total of 16, and around 1 Gb of swap used).

In htop you can also sort processes by mem usage, so what is eating your ram?

Might be oom killer terminated 0ad and mate simply bugged out.

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8 hours ago, hyperion said:

In htop you can also sort processes by mem usage, so what is eating your ram?

Might be oom killer terminated 0ad and mate simply bugged out.

TorBrowser, mostly.

And yes, the termination of 0ad is certainly a possibility, but then why is the 0ad screen still there ? And how to get out of this mess without shutting down the computer ?

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So my cristal ball tells me 0ad got indeed terminated (oom killed) and mate/X therefor hangs. If you are lucky you can send those child processes with unsaved work a sigterm and they gracefully save your work upon closing but that depends on the app obviously. Some apps also save changes to disk and in case of a crash allow you to restore your work upon restart. Maybe ask in the Debian forum as people there are actually familiar with your setup.

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To bad, I did not see your posts earlier. 0 A.D. locked-up on me. I was able to unlock it by killing the process. After that, i cam to look a the posts. Anyway ...

On 26/09/2021 at 6:25 AM, LienRag said:
Problem is I can find no way to get out of the game fullscreen to access the other windows on my Debian Mate computer (on Bullseye).

I an not familiar with Debian. I do know that with Linux you can establish multiple work spaces. I am using Linux Mint. I have established 4 workspaces and programmed shortcut keys to access each workspace. I was able to "kill" 0 A.D. by switching to a different workspace and stopping it through the command line. An unexpected problem with 0 A.D. was that it locked my ability to use the system monitor to kill the 0 A.D. process. I was forced to use the command line which fortunately worked. So no need to reboot.

On 26/09/2021 at 6:25 AM, LienRag said:

What is surprising is that I don't find any process that I can relate to 0ad : what is the name of the processes that I should be searching for ?

I reloaded 0 A.D. based on this topic and reran the grep command: "ps -ef| grep /usr/games". I did get two results: "/bin/sh /usr/games/0ad" and "/usr/games/pyrogenesis". However, at the time 0 A.D. crashed, I got three results when I ran the grep command. The third result may have been the one where 0 A.D. got hung-up. Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of that process.

On 27/09/2021 at 3:57 PM, LienRag said:

I did ask on the Debian forum but did get only partial answers that didn't solve the problem.

Check-out the Debian forum for creating multiple workspaces and how to create keyboard shortcuts to access each workspace.

 

 

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Hi LienRag.

The process name of 0ad on my Debian system is "main". In pstree look for the following hierarchy, or similar, depending on your shell.

bash---sh---0ad---main---18*[{main}]

If you have already terminated "0ad" then "main" will be a standalone process instead of a subprocess of the 0ad shell script. Be careful if you have other apps running with processes called "main". I would advise finding the "main" process that is pyrogenesis based on memory usage and other characteristics (the cwd and exe symlinks in /proc/[pid] point to the working directory and the path to executable), then use kill -9 [pid of correct main] instead of using killall.

And, 0ad freezes my computer every few weeks. Usually I can't even switch virtual console to kill the process. Instead I have to either ssh into my computer to kill the process or use the "Magic SysRq" key.

The Debian default configuration of the Magic SysRq key prevents signalling processes, so before your computer freezes it is necessary to enable the process signalling feature.

Edit /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf
Find the line

kernel.sysrq=438

and change it to

kernel.sysrq=1

If you can't find the line then add kernel.sysrq=1 to the end of the file.

Then reboot.

When 0ad freezes your computer completely, use Alt+SysRq(PrintScreen)+k or Alt+SysRq+i to kill 0ad. Wait a while, sometimes a minute or more, try multiple times if necessary. Eventually you should get a black screen with a blinking cursor. Switch to virtual console 1 with Ctrl+Alt+F1, login as root or a user with sudo privileges, systemctl isolate multi-user.target, systemctl start graphical.target, switch to virtual console 7 with Ctrl+Alt+F7, login to your desktop environment, should have a usable computer again. It might be wise to backup anything stored in memory filesystems to disk and reboot.

Documentation about the Magic SysRq key.

Debian-specific documentation is here.

Unfortunately, I still don't know what causes the game to freeze like this. It seems to be a long-standing bug that is difficult to trace the root causes. Or, maybe no one has tried to trace the root causes in depth. This is the closest bug report that I have seen to the symptoms described.

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I had a new occurrence of the same problem, this time testing the Terra Magna mod (still on KenWood).

Also, this time (since I had less things running in the background) the RAM was way less used (around 4 Gb on a total of 16 Gb).

I tried the "ps -ef| grep /usr/games" command but it brought me nothing save the grep process itself.

pstree didn't show anything remotely looking like 0ad nor pyrogenesis.

I had not configured the different workspaces nor the Magic SysRq.

Since I didn't have unsaved work on the other windows this time, I just restarted the game from the F1 console.

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@Yekaterina
Since you are an experienced ArchLinux user (and I've stated with this/with EndeavourOS), can you please add a hint how this works on Arch? I followed instructions about the MagicKey but didn't see an effect.

Sorry, I don't mean to hijack this thread for my own questions, but maybe this would help other Arch/Linux users, too.

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15 minutes ago, Ceres said:

@Yekaterina
Since you are an experienced ArchLinux user (and I've stated with this/with EndeavourOS), can you please add a hint how this works on Arch? I followed instructions about the MagicKey but didn't see an effect.

Sorry, I don't mean to hijack this thread for my own questions, but maybe this would help other Arch/Linux users, too.

Sorry I don't know what Magic key is...

If you want to kill 0ad, try 

sudo killall 0ad

Or 

sudo killall pyrogenesis

You can exit full screen with alt+enter so that you can reach the terminal.

 

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2 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Sorry I don't know what Magic key is...

If you want to kill 0ad, try 

sudo killall 0ad

Or 

sudo killall pyrogenesis

You can exit full screen with alt+enter so that you can reach the terminal.

 

Magic SysRq is described above. I haven't tried it.
I guess a Magic Key would be one that prevents any error in the terminal ? Would be nice to have...

Note than none of your solutions worked on my two crashes, as described on my first and last post.

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And the LORD spake, saying,

Quote

"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it."

:rofl:

PS (for those who might not have recognized it):

From the movie scene before the fight of the Knights of the Round Table (comprised of the hilarious Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, Palin, and others) against the Rabbit of Caerbannog, in: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. :D

Edited by Ceres
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