Steam survey crashes client

[MilesBHuff]

Your system information

• Steam client version (build number or date): 1576908998
• Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): arch rolling 64-bit
• Opted into Steam client beta?: [Yes/No] Yes
• Have you checked for system updates?: [Yes/No] Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Steam crashes a second after the hardware survey appears. This has resulted in Steam being completely unusable since the beginning of this new year.

I get the same result no matter the value of STEAM_RUNTIME.

Googling did not reveal anything useful for me to try, and there are no commandline arguments that tell Steam to not run the survey.

stdout/stderr: https://gist.github.com/MilesBHuff/cce70f3f29248545af00ecbeb397aa98

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Open Steam

[MilesBHuff]

Seemingly-related issue: #5114

[ruany]

Got the same issue.

If you opt out of the survey (two clicks) quickly enough for it to not finish initializing, the client doesn't crash and the survey is disabled, until next time.

[MilesBHuff]

I figured that would be the case, but unfortunately mine will not allow me to interact with the dialogs while they're loading.

Thankfully, I can still play games if I launch them with steam steam://rungameid/$GAMEID.

[TTimo]

@ruany can you provide Help > System Information for your install (out of the current beta, with the 'Steam Linux Runtime Information' section). (doesn't sound like @MilesBHuff could provide his since he crashes on startup)

[MilesBHuff]

@TTimo I figured out that I can open Steam with steam steam://rungameid/foo, without triggering the hardware survey. Since discovering this, I've been able to use Steam more-or-less normally again; although it still of course crashes immediately if I try to start Steam normally.

Here is my System Information: https://gist.github.com/MilesBHuff/fcd67d908794db623543c9777f8484a2

[TTimo]

The system info reports that you have a lot of library errors in your steam runtime - are you using the steam runtime modified by Arch? If that's the case please switch to Valve's official runtime and try again.

[MilesBHuff]

I noticed that right after I posted it, and I just finished regenerating the gist with steam-runtime instead of steam-native. Should be a lot less cruft now. Link is the same as the one I included in my last comment.

The crash happens either way, though, as I mentioned in my OP. :\

I'm going to look into fixing the UTF8 issues the report mentions, and see if that somehow magically fixes the survey.

EDIT: Launching steam with LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 resolves the main locale issue, but does not fix the survey crashing issue. It's still throwing errors over missing C.UTF-8, though. Going to try fixing that next.

EDIT: Apparently Arch doesn't have C.UTF-8 because it's not in glibc, and Debian/Fedora patched theirs in. Don't know if that's related to this problem or not, but worth mentioning.
electron-userland/electron-builder#2340
I figured out how to cheese the lack of C.UTF-8 in Arch Linux with localedef -i POSIX -f UTF-8 C.UTF-8. Survey still doesn't work, though. Regardless, I've updated my Gist.

[ruany]

System info with Steam runtime (crash occurs in both native runtime and in Steam runtime):
https://gist.github.com/ruany/cb1a60ab28880ee60dd5d583eb96c0e3

FWIW the Steam survey has worked before, using the native runtime, but stopped working after an update. Currently not experiencing any other issues with the client besides the Steam survey crash.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I get this error in kernel logs when the client crashes:
steam[71762]: segfault at 0 ip 00000000f2e971ed sp 00000000ffb1fa80 error 4 in steamui.so[f2478000+1352000]

[TTimo]

@ruany can you get a crash ID out of the stderr/stdout output? I got one for @MilesBHuff but I'd like to make sure it's the same crash.

It looks like this:

assert_20200103200500_1.dmp[60610]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes
assert_20200103200500_1.dmp[60610]: response: CrashID=bp-289f5a6e-4f0f-486f-9cc4-8a23d2200103
assert_20200103200500_1.dmp[60610]: file ''/tmp/dumps/assert_20200103200500_1.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-289f5a6e-4f0f-486f-9cc4-8a23d2200103''

[ruany]

@TTimo Here:

Jan 05 06:10:43 desktop assert_20200105061023_1.dmp[49370]: file ''/tmp/dumps/assert_20200105061023_1.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-4ce241dd-f2fe-4373-9d5b-e3a242200104''
Jan 05 06:13:07 desktop crash_20200105061307_28.dmp[71110]: Uploading dump (out-of-process)
                                                            /tmp/dumps/crash_20200105061307_28.dmp
Jan 05 06:13:08 desktop assert_20200105061248_1.dmp[71129]: Uploading dump (out-of-process)
                                                            /tmp/dumps/assert_20200105061248_1.dmp
Jan 05 06:13:10 desktop crash_20200105061307_28.dmp[71110]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes
Jan 05 06:13:10 desktop crash_20200105061307_28.dmp[71110]: file ''/tmp/dumps/crash_20200105061307_28.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-10054587-dd06-4c27-b08a-e27ec2200104''
Jan 05 06:13:10 desktop assert_20200105061248_1.dmp[71129]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes
Jan 05 06:13:10 desktop assert_20200105061248_1.dmp[71129]: file ''/tmp/dumps/assert_20200105061248_1.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-74fa228d-22bc-4ec9-96f8-cd8bd2200104''
Jan 05 06:13:45 desktop assert_20200105061324_1.dmp[79457]: Uploading dump (out-of-process)
                                                            /tmp/dumps/assert_20200105061324_1.dmp
Jan 05 06:13:48 desktop assert_20200105061324_1.dmp[79457]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes

[Urth]

assert_20200108020657_1.dmp[31580]: Finished uploading minidump (out-of-process): success = yes
assert_20200108020657_1.dmp[31580]: response: CrashID=bp-53b5f5eb-0fe2-41d7-8622-2ae662200107
assert_20200108020657_1.dmp[31580]: file ''/tmp/dumps/assert_20200108020657_1.dmp'', upload yes: ''CrashID=bp-53b5f5eb-0fe2-41d7-8622-2ae662200107''

I have the same crash on Gentoo Linux ~amd64.

As a workaround you can edit ~/.steam/steam/config/config.vdf and replace the SurveyDate with a recent date so the survey doesn't show.

[TTimo]

Next Steam client beta (> Dec 20) will have a fix.

[kisak-valve]

Hello, per "Fix a crash while preparing the hardware survey" in the 2019-01-09 Steam client beta update, please opt into Steam's beta client and retest.

[MilesBHuff]

Steam just updated and the survey works now, without crashing the Steam client. Thank you for the timely turnaround!