MythFrontend crashes after upgrade to v31

[pvrmine]

I will happily attempt to gather whatever will help with troubleshooting.
Host is on Devuan 3.0 (beowulf), based on Debian buster.
Upgraded from the deb-multimedia.org repositories, as I have done for years.
mythtv-frontend version is 31.0+fixes20200609.gitdd35db8df1-dmo1.
The same setup worked well with v30 and many versions prior.
The video card is an old nVidia 7900 GS, so limited in capabilities. The nVidia driver is 304.137.
The frontend crashes before rendering its top-level menu.

The backend works fine, and a remote frontend on OSX also works fine.

I tried blanking the theme in the settings table, without apparent difference.

Based on another thread, I invoked the frontend with gdb. Normally I run fullscreen, but invoked windowed to make it a little easier to get back to gdb.

I've attached that log, including a call in gdb to "thread apply all bt full", per the other message thread here.

Edit: wondering if I should switch to the Nouveau driver.
Edit 2: No change in symptom with Nouveau.

[bill6502]

I'd try starting mythfrontend with: --override-setting libCECEnabled=0
for starters. https://pkgs.org/search/?q=libcec shows a different
version (for Buster) than libcec.so.5 in the stack. But I don't use
CEC or Devuan.

[pvrmine]

mythfrontend segfaults even with --override-setting libCECEnabled=0.

Edit: I don't know what pulled in either libcec4 or libcec5, but I was able to remove them without them triggering removal of anything else.

mythfrontend still crashes with or without the override.

[mark_k]

Well if your packaged version was compiled with libcec support - it will be expecting libcec to be installed and will likely crash without it.

I do wonder however whether that might be a red herring. The logs do not show that the nvidia driver is being used for OpenGL (it is falling back to software emulation) and I suspect it is no coincidence that the main thread (1) is last active when checking VDPAU support.

What does glxinfo show? and vdpauinfo?

Regards
Mark

[pvrmine]

glxinfo and vdpauinfo attached.

My combined BE/FE's video card is quite old, and its VDPAU capability is limited. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7 ... ce_7900_GS)

My recently-built Linux desktop's remote frontend runs correctly.

I compared versions of mythtv-frontend dependencies, and did find a few differences.

I thought I had found a solution in libqt5x11extras5, but the frontend doesn't start consistently even after updating that package. If I let it go on its own under the display manager (currently nodm), then it starts, fails, maybe repeats that a bit, then ultimately stays up.

[wesnewell]

Proprietary Nvidia drivers have locked up my GF8200 systems for years.Try switching to the default driver.

[pvrmine]

Proprietary Nvidia drivers have locked up my GF8200 systems for years.Try switching to the default driver.

Do you mean Nouveau?

The same symptom (mythfrontend crash) occurs with Nouveau. Also, the video card runs hotter with Nouveau even when idle, causing too much fan noise.

[pvrmine]

Update:

I tamed the loud fan on my spare nVidia GT610 card and put it into my BE/FE machine. With VDPAU now fully supported through h.264, mythfrontend starts without trouble, using official drivers.