Emulationstation crashed and Cannot allocate memory on pi4

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).

rejesterd

Yeah I'm also using the 4g model, for reference.

quicksilver

@mitu mine is the 2gb version. If you are also on the same kernel then I guess we can rule that out. I guess that makes sense since my pi 3 which was rock stable now has stability issues and its on raspbian stretch. The only two things I changed on my pi 3 were switching to nostalgia-neo and using my latest skyscraper gameslist modifications. So I feel it has to be related to them in some way. I might try restoring skyscraper gameslist default settings and testing that out, maybe its a memory related issue.

rejesterd

Even 2g should be plenty, but I would at least confirm how much RSS emulationstation is using (especially when the crash happens).

Efriim

What is the resolution you have set with runcommand psp and dreamcast? And which display port are you using?

I got 4.5.4 installed over raspbian. Using outer hdmi port. Default runcommands.
Inner hdmi port has got a tty (I'm not so sure about the setup but ES doesn't display here), changing res just doesnt work for me and throws errors.

Did you try rolling back the kernel?