Ugly linux crash...

[Dirty Hairy]

I've been playing around with linux and exult a bit again, and when I select Serpent Isle (didn't try black gate), the game crashes in the most horrible way...: the second exult task is rendered "defunc" and can't be killed anymore. I experienced this before, but it happend ocassionally while playing and not when the game was starting up. I thought it had something to do with sound (and SDLmixer), so I disabled it completely in the .cfg, but still the same...
Has anybody already seen this and got a clue...? I'm using the current snapshot (O.K., current means approx 1 week old; but it also happened with an older snapshot), compiled without timidity, as I want to use ogg...

[wjp]

A defunct process is one that hasn't been terminated properly by its parent. This isn't harmful in any way, and it should disappear when you exit Exult.

[Karlos]

How do you end-up with more than one Exult process? Can you kill the defunct one with "kill -9"?

Maybe you have two exult tasks because the first one never went away, which is why the second one crashes? If you can kill both of them off with "kill -9", do you still get a crash when you try to launch Exult again?


-Karl

[wjp]

Btw, it's normal that you can't kill (even -9) a defunct process, since it's already dead. It'll disappear when it's parent properly terminates it, or when the parent is terminated.

[Dirty Hairy]

Hmm, good to know about "defunc". Well, then the first exult process is the problem. I can't terminate exult anymore, the screen is blank and and I can't "kill -9" it.
I don't know if it is supposed to, but running exult creates 3 (when using sound 4) processes on my machine, 1 (2) of which can be killed when the came crahes.
So one exult process and its child process remain after the crash which can't be killed, and when I try to start the game again, the exult screen won't come up, and I'll end up with another pair of unkillable processes.

[drcode]

I think those are really separate threads. I know the audio creates a thread, and there's the main one, but I'm not sure what the other two are from.

[artaxerxes]

just for the kick, type the following (from root user):

# killall -9 exult

Then start exult again.

Artaxerxes

[wjp]

If artaxerxes' suggestion doesn't help, what's the status of the exult processes? (as reported by 'ps auxww')

(The status is the letter like 'R', 'S', 'Z', 'D' somewhere near the end)

[Dirty Hairy]

Tried killing as root, but no succes... The status of the top process is D, the of the defunc child Z.

[wjp]

D? that's non-interruptable sleep, meaning it's waiting for I/O (disk or network I/O, usually)
Is it trying to read files through a dead NFS share? Are you getting any disk I/O errors on the console (VC1, usually) or in the logs?

No easy way to kill a D process, AFAIK.

Z = zombie = defunct

[Dirty Hairy]

Hey, that might be it, the gamedata resides on a ntfs-partition... if it tries to write to this, it'll fail.
I'll just reboot and try again with files on the ext2 partition...

[Dirty Hairy]

Well, thanks a lot, I got it running nice and smoothly now.
Another thing: do you have any experience if running the game with 320x240 will break it? I could't convince my x-server to run wir 320x200 or 640x200, and I hate those black bars on the top and bottom of the game.

[wjp]

It shouldn't really break.

You might want to make sure that you're close to items when you use them, pick them up or talk to them, since the usecode may be expecting you to be within a 320x200 screen.

Also, you'll probably get some weird effects in dungeons and mazes, but those should be only visual.

[Darke]

I've wandered through BG with a default resolution of 400x300x2 and haven't noticed any problems. SI is probably a bit tricker in regards to usecode triggers and such, but like wjp said if make sure you're close to the things you're going to pick up/talk to, things should be fine.