Emulationstation crashed and Cannot allocate memory on pi4

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...

mitu

@quicksilver - what 4b model do you have ? If it's memory leak related, might not happen so fast on my model (the 4Gb one).
4.19.97-v7l+ is the latest/current Raspbian kernel version, but it was released more than 1 month ago (2020-02-13 was the installation date on my system).