Emulationstation crashed and Cannot allocate memory on pi4

[mitu]

@quicksilver Hm, seems we're getting somewhere, but since the output is truncated we don't see the calling site in the EmulationStation code. Do you remember what system was loaded when the crash occured ? I realized I might not have one of the systems from your install and that's why I couldn't - briefly - reproduce the crash.

[quicksilver]

@mitu In this particular instance I think it was PPSSPP, though it has crashed for me on multiple different systems. And the crash isnt reliably reproduced. A crash can sometimes occur on the first game I launch or I might have several crashes in a row or I might launch many games with no crashing.

[mitu]

Just for comparison of systems, can your run

find $HOME/RetroPie/roms/ -type d ! -empty -maxdepth 1 

and post the output on pastebin.com ? Just want to see what's the difference from my system list.

[quicksilver]

@mitu https://pastebin.com/Qtub3ju5

I also note that my gameslist view is set to video. I dont have any videos but its the only way for the marquee/wheel art to show up. Not sure if that matters but thought Id point it out.

[mitu]

@quicksilver said in Emulationstation crashed and Cannot allocate memory on pi4:

I also note that my gameslist view is set to video.

I already have this setting. Thanks for the system list, I'll see if it has any impact on my installation.

[quicksilver]

I just got it to crash on the carbon theme. I just launched and then exited a PSP game a few times to cause the crash. The only other thing I can think of that would also suddenly make my pi 3 crash as well is that I am using some specific system artwork.xml files with skyscraper. For example, for PSP I have an artwork-psp.xml which corrects the image to the correct aspect ratio for when I generate my gameslist. I have done this for several other systems as well to make the aspect ratios correct for systems that werent 4:3. Could this cause an issue?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- This is the default artwork.xml provided by Skyscraper. More examples can be found in '~/.skyscraper'. Be sure to check the full artwork documentation here: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper/blob/master/docs/ARTWORK.md -->
<artwork>
  <output type="screenshot" width="320" height="180">
      </output>
  <output type="marquee" resource="wheel"/>
</artwork>

[mitu]

@quicksilver said in Emulationstation crashed and Cannot allocate memory on pi4:

Could this cause an issue?

I don't think so - the end result is still a png image that EmulationStation loads, artwork.xml is just a set of design instructions for Skyscraper of how to produce that image from the cached artwork, it doesn't influence how EmulationStation loads or displays the resulting image.

[quicksilver]

@mitu Yea, I didnt think it should be a problem either except that is the only other thing that I changed on my pi 3 and now its crashing as well.

[mitu]

Still can't get a crash. Let's see how we can further progress.

• can you try with view mode set to 'detail' (i.e. no 'video') to see if the lack of marquees has any impact ?
• can you upload the gamelist.xml and the media folder (generated by Skyscraper) for your PSP system - temporarily - so I can have an identical gamelist/system for PSP ?

[ByteThis]

I had a similar problem one time a few months ago when I was editing my gamelist.xml for SNES. I was manually editing it for an image and metadata and incorrectly edited the gamelist.xml and when I tried to start any rom in SNES, ES would crash. I fixed the editing correctly and had no more crashes. Not sure if this is relevant to your situation but thought I would mention it. (As my rom would start and I would play it..then it would crash).

[quicksilver]

@mitu https://mega.nz/#F!kJBnBSZZ!j-L65dDeg6kYNE09Ry7tQg

Ill also try detail view as you suggest

[quicksilver]

@ByteThis I havent done any manual edits so I dont think its the same issue.

[mitu]

Can you also upload the downloaded media from ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/psp ? I though they were in your system folder, but they're not. For some reason, trying to scrape the filenames in the gamelist only gets the info for about 1/3 of them.

[quicksilver]

@mitu I linked that in my above post already

[mitu]

Sorry, I realized during testing that the images are present in the upload, it's just the gamelist file that references the different location. You can delete the uploaded files.

Unfortunately, I still can't reproduce the crash. Obviously, my games are 'fake' files, but launching them starts PPSSPP. I tried with both themes (Carbon/Nostalgic-Neo).

[quicksilver]

@mitu thanks for trying. This issue is really puzzling. There must be something else unique to my setup causing the issue. I think I'm going to have to re-image.

[rejesterd]

This is a memory leak related to launching PSP games from emulationstation. I can't reproduce the crash like you're seeing, but I can definitely see RSS usage increase consistently after repeatedly launch a PSP game. You can confirm this by running..

while :; do ps --sort -rss -eo rss,pid,command | grep emulationstation\/emulationstation$; sleep 1; done

The first column of output is the RSS usage. For me, it consistently keeps going up when I re-launch the same psp game over and over. That doesn't happen with other games (PSX, for example).

Not sure why you're seeing a crash so early, but maybe your ES RSS usage is growing beyond whatever the configured limit is.

[quicksilver]

@rejesterd Im guessing that is a different issue. I just had another crash, this time launching a dreamcast game. I had gameslist view set to detailed. I cant seem to nail down what is causing this issue. Can you tell me what firmware/kernel version you are on by running:

uname -a

[rejesterd]

Linux raspberrypi 4.19.93-v7l+ #1290 SMP Fri Jan 10 16:45:11 GMT 2020 armv7l GNU/Linux

But yeah, if it's also happening with dreamcast, then the issue is probably not specific to PSP.. maybe it's just that the leak with ES & PSP makes the crash occur faster.

[quicksilver]

@rejesterd Im on 4.19.97-v7l+. Im going to try rolling back and seeing if that helps. If not I guess Im going to have to re-image...