RPi / Kodi 18.9 / Buster - instability (crashes) just playing audio

Since the upgrade to buster a few days ago, on a headless (audio-only) build, I am noticing kodi crashes + restarts a lot more often than before (with 18.7 / pre-buster, I would notice a kodi restart maybe once a month). Since Buster, this is happening once a day, about once every 5 to 10 albums played.

The log shows segmentation faults.

: Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 160x45
Dec 09 19:35:51 rpi mediacenter[2671]: Kodi exited with return code 139 after 26 hours, 13 minutes and 41 seconds
Dec 09 19:35:51 rpi mediacenter[2671]: /usr/bin/mediacenter: line 142: 21653 Segmentation fault      sudo -u osmc LIRC_SOCKET_PATH=/var/run/lirc/lircd $KODI --standalone -fs

I use no plugins at all in kodi. The content is mounted over NFS, from a linux server, that has had no changes in a while, it’s been working super stable for many years.

I use a HiFiBerry card and Kodi’s own web interface.

Very simple use case, so a little disappointed to have run into this.

Wondering if anyone is noticing issues with the current kodi build in osmc?

Upload full logs via grab-logs -A

One of the “typical” issues that we see after such big updates is issues with the SD Card.
So suggest either try a new SD Card or take a backup and then test the existing card with H2Testw

Thanks @fzinken

I checked the kodi log of the crashed session, I see an error triggered by the OSMC Settings app,

2020-12-09 19:55:41.974 T:1916044208  NOTICE: stop dvd detect media
2020-12-09 19:55:42.348 T:1703985376 WARNING: CPythonInvoker(0, /usr/share/kodi/addons/script.module.osmcsetting.updates/service.py): the python script "/usr/share/kodi/addons/script.module.osmcsetting.updates/service.py" has left several classes in memory that we couldn't clean up. The classes include: N9XBMCAddon7xbmcgui6WindowE,N9XBMCAddon7xbmcgui12ControlImageE,N14PythonBindings31XBMCAddon_xbmc_Monitor_DirectorE
2020-12-09 19:55:42.492 T:1916044208  NOTICE: Application stopped
2020-12-09 19:55:42.692 T:1916044208  NOTICE: XBApplicationEx: destroying...
2020-12-09 19:55:44.818 T:1916044208  NOTICE: unload skin
2020-12-09 19:55:44.954 T:1916044208  NOTICE: unload sections
2020-12-09 19:55:45.156 T:1916044208  NOTICE: XBApplicationEx: application stopped!

I pasted more complete logs leading to the kodi / osmc settings app crash here

http://paste.osmc.tv/iseluvoqim.m

FWIUW I use the standard kodi skin, not the OSMC skin. I changed that a while ago as I found confluence consumed less CPU (and this build does not really need a GUI at all)

The SD Card is new. I’ve had SD Card issues below and this doesn’t fit the pattern. I run docker containers on this same RPi and they have zero problems, it’s just kodi crashing

I also captured the full logs as you requested, @fzinken I will send you the link via PM

It’s not a good idea to PM logs as that only allows that one person to look at them for you. The logs generally do not contain private information, so should be safe to post here.

As @bmillham wrote it is prefered to have more eyes looking on your logs so PM is not ideal.

I took a look and I wonder if your config.txt gpu_mem=96 might not be good enough anymore after the buster upgrade and the Kodi update.

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Hey there - here are the full logs:

https://paste.osmc.tv/epuwesidub

Hi @fzinken, I monitor both GPU and ARM memory, with my video-less configuration, GPU free memory is always above 32MBs, and this after a month or two of use; right now it’s 44MiB

image

Here’s the memory consumption and cpu utilization profile:

The big dip in memory consumption is the kodi crash + automatic restart event
The small increase in mem consumption was when I started some music playback (it’s normal)

This is the profile of GPU memory available:

The crash was at 19:55, after the crash kodi freed up a little video memory (as normal) but as you can see video memory consumption is super stable both prior and after the crash, with plenty of free of mem.

I ran a dist-upgrade yesterday an noticed a lot of low level libraries getting updated (from python to systemd) - I will advise if the issue re-occurs

FWIW I haven’t seen random kodi crashes in a while and buster is now really stable - my new setup is now arguably better than it ever was with stretch: less average CPU and less memory utilization.

I did try the default OSMC skin for a day and quickly had to come back to Kodi’s as I noticed it was growing memory consumption much faster than kodi’s confluence - which grows very very slowly over time. I ended up disabling the OSMC addon in Kodi as well since in my simple audio-only headless use-case it wasn’t needed at all.

To make the system bullet-proof I run a twice-daily check of kodi’s memory consumption and if it exceeds a threshold (that I set to 22% of the system memory) then it restarts the mediacenter service, if kodi is idle. In my normal use it takes kodi around 5 days to breach the threshold. This is the tradeoff I had to make to be able to run my home automation tools all in the same Pi.