Anyone experiencing crashes with ghostty?

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1

Lately, ghostty has become unusable on my machine (archlinux x86_64), and I’m not sure how to investigate.

The terminal crashes when opening some TUI apps such as impala or jj commit --interactive. All I get is this report when starting ghostty from another terminal

info: ghostty version=1.3.1-arch2
info: ghostty build optimize=ReleaseFast
info: runtime=.gtk
info: font_backend=.fontconfig_freetype
info: dependency harfbuzz=14.2.1
info: dependency fontconfig=21801
info: renderer=renderer.generic.Renderer(renderer.OpenGL)
info: libxev default backend=io_uring
info(os_locale): setlocale from env result=C
info(gtk): GTK version build=4.22.2 runtime=4.22.4
info(gtk): libadwaita version build=1.9.0 runtime=1.9.1
info: reading configuration file path=/home/tom/.config/ghostty/config
info(config): default shell src=passwd value=/usr/bin/fish
info(config): default working directory src=passwd value=/home/tom
warning(gtk_ghostty_application): setting GDK_DEBUG=
warning(gtk_ghostty_application): setting GDK_DISABLE=gles-api,vulkan
warning(glib): WARNING: Adwaita: The resource style-dark.css is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. Use style.css with media queries instead.
warning(glib): WARNING: Adwaita: The resource style-hc.css is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. Use style.css with media queries instead.
warning(glib): WARNING: Adwaita: The resource style-hc-dark.css is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. Use style.css with media queries instead.
info(opengl): loaded OpenGL 4.6
info(io_exec): found Ghostty resources dir: /usr/share/ghostty
info(io_exec): shell integration automatically injected shell=.fish
warning(gtk_ghostty_application): unimplemented action=.cell_size
info(io_exec): started subcommand path=/bin/sh pid=218804
free(): invalid pointer
fish: Job 1, 'ghostty' terminated by signal SIGABRT (Abandon)

Has anyone else experienced this? ghostty +crash-report gives no crash report.

EDIT: also, I tried to revert to an older version of ghostty, but I get the same crash, so I’m not sure if the culprit is ghostty, or a dependency, or the arch package…

2

I am using Ghostty 1.3.1-arch2 on Omarchy, pretty up-to-date from the repo, and have seen no issues like this at all.

3

The invalid pointer comes at the time that the surface is created.
Try to display all the ghostty related logs together:

journalctl --user -g 'ghostty'
4

I didn’t know I could catch such logs with journalctl, thanks for the tip!

juin 15 12:30:45 toolbox systemd[919]: Started app-ghostty-surface-transient-227321.scope.
juin 15 12:30:51 toolbox systemd-coredump[227362]: [🡕] Process 227293 (ghostty) of user 1000 dumped core.

                                                   Stack trace of thread 227319:
                                                   #0  0x00007f6cf529a29c n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x9a29c)
                                                   #1  0x00007f6cf523e7d0 raise (libc.so.6 + 0x3e7d0)
                                                   #2  0x00007f6cf5225681 abort (libc.so.6 + 0x25681)
                                                   #3  0x00007f6cf5226700 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x26700)
                                                   #4  0x00007f6cf52a47cc n/a (libc.so.6 + 0xa47cc)
                                                   #5  0x00007f6cf52a47e4 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0xa47e4)
                                                   #6  0x00007f6cf6a13042 FcLangSetHasLang (libfontconfig.so.1 + 0x28042)
                                                   #7  0x000055775b71af44 n/a (ghostty + 0x138ff44)
                                                   ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

EDIT: if I’m reading this correctly, my fontconfig configuration triggers a situation where FcLangSetHasLang returns something that is not properly handled by ghostty?

5

@dimdin thanks for steering me in the right direction, it helped me write a bug report on ghostty’s github.

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6

For the record I found the culprit. Thanks to strace, I discovered that fontconfig was failing at opening a file in $HOME/.cache/fontconfig, and this triggered a null pointer that wasn’t checked in ghostty’s codebase. Cleaning the cache solved the problem.

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