Friday, October 25, 2013

Google Talk plugin presence breaks Eclipse in Fedora 20.

This is the kind of news I really hate to announce, and at the same time, this is the reason why I'm addicted to open source. With open-source I could report it. Investigate it, or even workaround it. But the only thing I can do with a binary plugin is to remove it.

Symptoms:
Eclipse 4.3.1 in Fedora 20 crashes shortly after content assist or javadoc is shown. ABRT discovers a crash.

Reason:
Both content assist and javadoc are browser-based. Google Talk plugin interferes with webkit/SWT, and in the end JVM crashes.

Workaround:
Remove Google Talk plugin.
yum -y remove google-talkplugin 


Unfortunately, the generated core dump is not traceable :
Caused by: sun.jvm.hotspot.debugger.UnmappedAddressException: 7fd109daea4c

Also, gdb analysis is not very helpful due to the missing debug information of googletalk-plugin:

(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007fd101435834 in ?? ()
#1  0x00000000fb405748 in ?? ()
#2  0x00007fd1055e7000 in ?? ()
#3  0x0000000000000007 in ?? ()
#4  0x00007fd100000001 in ?? ()
#5  0x00007fd1051b5a20 in ?? ()
#6  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()

Anyone knowing a right contact at google - please help! This situation doesn't serve well anyone.

Side comment: Eclipse is slowly stopping working on Linux.

13 comments:

  1. Thanks for the heads up. I am not using Fedora 20 yet, using the stable 19, but, can you try with the MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable pointing it to an empty directory? Grepping over the libwebkitgtk*.so I found a reference to the variable, so it looks like it is supported by Webkit.

    In normal use there is no need for those plugins to be available inside Eclipse, so this workaround, if it works, can avoid you not being able to use the plugin in your browser of choice

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  2. Thanks for your post, you saved my life :-D

    I changed Mozilla instead WebKit adding this line into /etc/eclipse.ini:
    -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

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  3. Replies
    1. Thank you! Any chance for public progress communication?

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  4. Thank you Chris! You saved my life, I was at brink of nervous breakdown because of this. God bless you, thanks once more!

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  5. Right on Chris, thanks for the note. Saved me a lot of time. Cheers!

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Thank you very much ! It solved my problem, and I gain a lot of time

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  7. Thanks. it saved me a lot of time.

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  8. tmp fix is to add a line in /etc/eclipse.ini
    -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

    Let's hope for solution

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  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. The Linux google-talkplugin seems unmaintained as it also does not work in openSUSE 13.1 so removing it seems to be a sane decision here although the WebKit integration bug should be fixed.

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