#1107671 blueman-manager fails to start and segfaults on wayland

Package:
blueman
Source:
blueman
Description:
Graphical bluetooth manager
Submitter:
Giacomo Mulas
Date:
2025-07-11 14:29:01 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1107671#5
Date:
2025-06-11 17:57:38 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

blueman-manager fails to start and segfaults when running in a gnome session on wayland. All other graphical interfaces of blueman appear to work properly, oly blueman-manager crashes. Still, this is rather annoying since one cannot associate new devices on wayland. Blueman-manager opens correctly if I do it in a ssh session forwarding the display, since then it uses X and not wayland, so at least this can be used as a backup option. Please let me know if there are any tests you would like me to run, to help pinning this down.

Best regards,
Giacomo Mulas

#1107671#10
Date:
2025-06-21 07:28:19 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Giacomo,

can you please provide the details of the segfault, ideally a backtrace?

We've had single mentions upstream of a segfault in libgtk-3.so in
Pop!_OS 22.04 [1] with unknown solution and another one gone after
reinstalling the unnamed system (there was a reference to BMLFS, but
Solus is likely) [2].

[1] https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/issues/1818
[2]
https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/issues/2282#issuecomment-2582985937

Regards

#1107671#15
Date:
2025-06-22 06:50:10 UTC
From:
To:
of a python code such as blueman-manager?

However, I found an additional piece of information that may be useful: if I
unset the environment variable GTK_MODULES, which in my standard gnome
environment is set by the session to be
GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge:appmenu-gtk-module
then blueman-manager opens just fine. This is the second package that shows
this behaviour to me, the other one is gimp. It happens in gnome on
wayland.

Hope it helps. If you send me instructions (or a link containing them) to
get a backtrace of a python code, I'll gladly do that.

Bye
Giacomo

#1107671#20
Date:
2025-07-11 10:11:11 UTC
From:
To:
Hello,
I can reproduce this issue as well, but in my case GTK_MODULES appears
to be:
GTK_MODULES=canberra-gtk-module:appmenu-gtk-module

It doesn't crash when the variable is unset.
Moreover, I've found that it only crashes when GTK_MODULES contains
appmenu-gtk-module specifically.

Hope this helps to narrow down the issue.

Regards
LunarEclipse

On Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:50:10 +0200 (CEST) Giacomo Mulas
<giacomo.mulas@inaf.it> wrote:
 > On Sat, 21 Jun 2025, Christopher Schramm wrote:
 >
 > > can you please provide the details of the segfault, ideally a
backtrace?
 >
 > I am much more familiar with C, C++, Fortran, how do I produce a
backtrace
 > of a python code such as blueman-manager?
 >
 > However, I found an additional piece of information that may be
useful: if I
 > unset the environment variable GTK_MODULES, which in my standard gnome
 > environment is set by the session to be
 > GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge:appmenu-gtk-module
 > then blueman-manager opens just fine. This is the second package that
shows
 > this behaviour to me, the other one is gimp. It happens in gnome on
 > wayland.
 >
 > Hope it helps. If you send me instructions (or a link containing them) to
 > get a backtrace of a python code, I'll gladly do that.
 >
 > Bye
 > Giacomo
 >
 > --
 > _________________________________________________________________
 >
 > Giacomo Mulas <giacomo.mulas@inaf.it>
 > _________________________________________________________________
 >
 > INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari
 > via della scienza 5 - 09047 Selargius (CA)
 >
 > tel. +39 070 71180247
 > mob. : +39 329 6603810
 > _________________________________________________________________
 >
 > "every year keeps getting shorter, never seem to find the time
 > plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines
 > the time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say"
 > (Pink Floyd)
 > _________________________________________________________________
 >
 >

#1107671#25
Date:
2025-07-11 14:25:59 UTC
From:
To:
Thanks for the data!

It looks like this is a general issue somewhere between GTK+ 3 and that
appmenu-gtk-module and has nothing to do with either Debian or blueman
specifically.

I could easily reproduce it in a Manjaro VM by running Wayland and
starting either of the following applications with the module enabled:

* blueman
* gimp
* transmission-gtk (version 3, as 4 uses GTK 4)

The traces show an insane stack of gtk_css_node_ensure_style frames.
There are probably many more GTK+ 3 applications out there, that can
trigger the issue, but, supposedly, it depends on some specific structure.

References:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/11564 for GIMP

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1036775 for transmission

While the cause is most probably somewhere in that appmenu-gtk-module, I
can image that
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/fc823eb61002d1350305cba6ec718a7c4f6c05e1
covered it, so that GTK 4 is not affected by the crashes.

Workarounds include excluding appmenu-gtk-module from GTK_MODULES or
setting GDK_BACKEND=x11.

Regards