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Troubleshooting crashes: Difference between revisions
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''' | {{note|'''This article is valid for FlightGear versions: 2.6, 2.8, 2.10, 2.12, 3.0+'''. Help us in keeping this article up to date! If you're facing some crash not listed here and manage to solve it, '''please add it to a proper section''', so that other can benefit from your experience!}} | ||
Crashes are never easy to troubleshoot. It's very likely that you'll need to experiment a bit to find out the cause, or at least to provide useful feedback. In fact issues depend a lot on things like hardware components, driver support and so on. Developers can't work on your machine, so you'll need to provide them with some specific information. This article will guide you in that. | |||
== Known problems == | |||
Before diving into the real troubleshooting, first try to see if one of the following is your case. This could be a huge time saver! | |||
'''If you problem is not listed here, please consider adding it after you have solved it! Others like you will be grateful!''' | |||
=== World Scenery 2.0 and 32-bit machines === | |||
[[World Scenery]] 2.0 (the one with [[CORINE]] and [[OpenStreetMap]] data) highly raised memory requirements with respect to the previous version. Basically, with 4GB of RAM once you could safely use a visibility of a hundred kilometers; with Scenery 2.0, 4GB is barely enough for 10 km. A 32-bit machine can't use more than that memory, and simply kills FlightGear when it asks for more. To verify this, reduce your visibility (in-sim with ''View > Level of Detail adjustment'' and set ''Bare'' to 8000 m) and see if it stops crashing. You can also check memory consumption with the tools provided by your OS. | |||
Sadly, the solution is keeping a low visibility, or moving to a 64-bit machine with at least 8GB of RAM. If you're feeling "hackish", you can try the solution reported at [[Unexpected Crashes with Scenery ver.2]]. | |||
=== Old graphics cards and FlightGear 2.10 === | |||
If you're using FlightGear 2.10, you're seeing crashes during simulator startup (without seeing the actual aircraft/scenery), and you're using an old enough graphics card, it is possible that your crash is due to a bug in that FG version and to your card lacking [[Shader|GLSL]] support. This bug would prevent using FG even with shaders off! Ironically, this bug comes from a feature introduced to help troubleshooting bugs. | |||
So, if you're on 2.10 and think your card could be old enough, try the minimal startup configuration below: if it keeps crashing, that's definitely it. The bug was solved immediately later (ver. 2.11) | |||
== | == Troubleshooting your crash == | ||
If FlightGear crashes (or looks/performs very badly/slowly), it's possible that this is due a number of reasons, such as limited hardware resources (CPU, GPU, RAM etc) or insufficient driver support - so crashes are not necessarily due to a faulty program. FlightGear does work for hundreds of forum users, and usually without any form of sophisticated prior setup or configuration. So if something doesn't work "out of the box" it's usually some local or system-specific issue. In general, you are unlikely to encounter any major bugs when using a release - if you don't mind having to deal with bugs and technical issues, we'd like to invite you to help us test prereleases (so called "release candidates"/RCs) and nightly builds - or directly build from git. | If FlightGear crashes (or looks/performs very badly/slowly), it's possible that this is due a number of reasons, such as limited hardware resources (CPU, GPU, RAM etc) or insufficient driver support - so crashes are not necessarily due to a faulty program. FlightGear does work for hundreds of forum users, and usually without any form of sophisticated prior setup or configuration. So if something doesn't work "out of the box" it's usually some local or system-specific issue. In general, you are unlikely to encounter any major bugs when using a release - if you don't mind having to deal with bugs and technical issues, we'd like to invite you to help us test prereleases (so called "release candidates"/RCs) and nightly builds - or directly build from git. | ||
== Possible causes == | === Possible causes === | ||
It's just as well possible that the FlightGear default settings are not supported with your hardware/drivers, so that the process will be killed by the OS because it's trying to do something not supported by your computer. If you are experiencing full system crashes, you should see [[System Crashes]] instead. | It's just as well possible that the FlightGear default settings are not supported with your hardware/drivers, so that the process will be killed by the OS because it's trying to do something not supported by your computer. If you are experiencing full system crashes, you should see [[System Crashes]] instead. | ||
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=== | === Reporting incompatible default settings === | ||
Once you have located and identified settings that seem to cause reproducible issues with your hardware, it would be a good idea to report these settings using the issue tracker, so that these can hopefully be made optional in the upcoming release: http://flightgear-bugs.googlecode.com/ | |||
== Further assistance == | |||
If you need help with the whole process, please get in touch via the FG forums. | If you need help with the whole process, please get in touch via the FG forums. | ||
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* screen shots showing frame rate, frame spacing, performance monitor, osg on-screen stats (see [[Howto:Use the system monitor]] ) | * screen shots showing frame rate, frame spacing, performance monitor, osg on-screen stats (see [[Howto:Use the system monitor]] ) | ||
* use the about dialog to provide other important information | * use the about dialog to provide other important information | ||
== Debugging Segfaults & Obtaining Backtraces == | == Debugging Segfaults & Obtaining Backtraces == | ||
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valgrind et all are great if you know how to use them, but for end users, these tools are too fine-grained, we would ideally support some per-subsystem or per-feature granularity for end users. | valgrind et all are great if you know how to use them, but for end users, these tools are too fine-grained, we would ideally support some per-subsystem or per-feature granularity for end users. | ||
== The original idea and future developments == | |||
Our hope is that we can come up with a fairly safe subset of FlightGear settings that should work for 99% of our users, even on moderately old hardware. This would enable us to change the FlightGear defaults accordingly, and use these settings as a safe fallback alternative - so that FlightGear should no longer just crash for people without certain hardware/features. | |||
There's a trend to expose more and more information via the property tree, to make the simulator increasinly runtime-configurable, and to allow subsystems to be re-initialized at runtime, so being able to start up FlightGear in some form of "safe" mode is generally a good thing and useful for anybody helping with troubleshooting on the forums, because it helps us exclude many potential problems. In the long run, such a profile could also be used as the foundation for a [[FlightGear Benchmark]] or some scripted regression suite to run FlightGear in a [[FlightGear Headless|headless]] mode to help with release preparations. | |||
== Related == | == Related == | ||