Crash when sharing screen on 1:1 calls

[yajo]

Hello friends!

After a lot of time without any issues on Element calls, it turns out that recently it started crashing when I attempt to share the screen in a 1:1 call.

I don't know very well how to diagnose this.

System: Fedora Linux 37.20230115.0 (Silverblue), wayland, GNOME 43.2, AMD Radeon™ Graphics.

[telometto]

Same issue here; same hw.

Here's the last output from running flatpak run im.riot.Riot and trying to share screen:

...
...
** (process:44414): WARNING **: 21:28:22.440: Error writing credentials to socket: Error sending message: Broken pipe
/app/bin/element: line 16:     3 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) env TMPDIR="$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/app/${FLATPAK_ID:-im.riot.Riot}" zypak-wrapper /app/Element/element-desktop $FLAGS "$@"

[jessicarod7]

Did this issue start occuring in the last two weeks? It may be related to the changes in #325 (in which case I need to update #337)

[telometto]

@cam-rod I'm not entirely sure, but not long ago it used to work fine. You could be right about the time frame, but I cannot answer with 100% certainty.

[yajo]

It stopped working long before. I followed this procedure:

➤ flatpak remote-info --log flathub im.riot.Riot 
          ID: im.riot.Riot
  Referencia: app/im.riot.Riot/x86_64/stable
Arquitectura: x86_64
        Rama: stable
   Colección: org.flathub.Stable
    Descarga: 118,0 MB
   Instalada: 297,7 MB
     Runtime: org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/22.08
         Sdk: org.freedesktop.Sdk/x86_64/22.08

      Commit: d3ceae47addf2d3a45e569c1a9ca4cb80d0497af2628ab8936b16885784bc57a
       Padre: c897044b0885b547e76702886039993c2a7fc73a9054ab36b91997b43984814b
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.20_amd64.deb to 1.11.22 (701e18a4)
       Fecha: 2023-02-03 00:22:34 +0000
   Histórico: 

      Commit: c897044b0885b547e76702886039993c2a7fc73a9054ab36b91997b43984814b
      Asunto: element.sh: Unconditionally enable WebRTCPipeWireCapturer (4de604d6)
       Fecha: 2023-02-02 16:53:49 +0000

      Commit: a2ba54cdc742926e6b99fe248c68e833791478330dde5daa8107457e4832c451
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.18_amd64.deb to 1.11.20 (44003fd5)
       Fecha: 2023-01-21 01:19:21 +0000

      Commit: 045b87059187f306a8ddae7f193d6494241ef15cbeeb473a1da452cd163371a3
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.17_amd64.deb to 1.11.18 (c1c2c2c5)
       Fecha: 2023-01-19 17:13:44 +0000

      Commit: ea6cb2947ca7435c512ebeb0a895f863f85a46ecdb5c1077eed717e4e6ebf370
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.16_amd64.deb to 1.11.17 (328e8659)
       Fecha: 2022-12-26 12:55:27 +0000

      Commit: 9bd0c958912a8187b019b3a11260da2e6c241b92a6e570fd0efc8b2f53186310
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.15_amd64.deb to 1.11.16 (7a978516)
       Fecha: 2022-12-07 08:14:35 +0000

      Commit: ec731245fd6e7ea473e41f1e756edf0d856985780ea4c3a23100bb316714b25b
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.14_amd64.deb to 1.11.15 (142cced5)
       Fecha: 2022-11-22 14:59:10 +0000

      Commit: 524e682fc42190a4536e27ea68fe170c88bf31198e7c687191c5915c981d5c5f
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.13_amd64.deb to 1.11.14 (ccc2f570)
       Fecha: 2022-11-08 22:57:57 +0000

      Commit: 8049c17aff993279fc4da0093f2df01f9f5d26672e4a17a0ee21227ea62c0f64
      Asunto: Update element-desktop_1.11.12_amd64.deb to 1.11.13 (779e29a5)
       Fecha: 2022-11-02 02:55:07 +0000

You can downgrade to the last version that worked properly with this (add sudo if installed system-wide):

flatpak update --commit 9bd0c958912a8187b019b3a11260da2e6c241b92a6e570fd0efc8b2f53186310 im.riot.Riot

If you update to the next release (ea6cb2947ca7435c512ebeb0a895f863f85a46ecdb5c1077eed717e4e6ebf370), Element will crash when sharing screen.

To freeze that Element version and make flatpak not update it automatically, run this:

flatpak mask im.riot.Riot

[yajo]

I updated my comment #334 (comment) because I got misleaded by the fact that upstream screen sharing got broken in 1.11.15 as you can see in element-hq/element-web#23808. In reality, for the flaptak, the last working release was 1.11.16.

The commit range where the failure exists is this one. Weird, it's just a normal package update. I hope this can help to see what changed upstream that broke the package!

Data from upstream in 1.11.17. Something there must have broken this package:

• Release notes
• Commits

[jessicarod7]

Weird. I don't have time to look into it, but hopefully it can be isolated to the WebRTC configuration.

[byquanton]

No longer Crashes with #387 🥳
(But it may open too many Screen sharing Portals)

[byquanton]

@yajo can you close this issue as it is resolved now?

[yajo]

Using GNOME 44.3 wayland I get tens of dialogs asking me to give screen share permissions. If I cancel some of those, it manages to crash. But if I'm fast enough sharing the screen, I can finally share it. The UX is very 💩 still, but at least I can make it work.

[byquanton]

electron/electron#39111 (comment)
→ The issue with the separate dialogs is fixed in the development Version of Electron, but not yet backported.
And the new dialogs opening is probably this in DesktopCapturerSourcePicker.tsx

        // We update the sources every 500ms to get newer thumbnails
        this.interval = window.setInterval(async (): Promise<void> => {
            this.setState({
                sources: await getDesktopCapturerSources(),
            });
        }, 500);

[yajo]

I opened element-hq/element-web#26014 but they told me this must be fixed downstream.

Indeed that code seems to be what opens the dialogs in loop. Maybe we could add a patch here to avoid that?