protonscr

Steam periodically crashes before reopening, issue seems to stem from libcef.so

steamopen Steam clientWeb Component
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#9974 · opened 2023-08-10 by returnofblank · updated 2025-03-08 · 10 comments · github
Rreturnofblank 2023-08-10 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1690583737
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Fedora Silverblue 38
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: No
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
  • Steam Logs: steam-logs.zip
  • GPU: RX 6950 XT (AMD)
  • System Specs

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

I have not tested any native binaries, this is what I have seen in the flatpak.

For some background information, I am running Steam using my iGPU on the Ryzen 5 7600. I am using Wayland and Pipewire.

This crash seems to be caused by file named "libcef.so" and "steamwebhelper", but Steam does appear to recover as it promptly reopens. Here is what I found from journalctl:

Aug 09 22:48:51 hal-9000 systemd-coredump[665195]: [🡕] Process 658569 (steamwebhelper) of user 1000 dumped core.
                                                   
                                                   Stack trace of thread 17190:
                                                   #0  0x00007f4480cc013b n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x5cc013b)
                                                   #1  0x00007f4481bbe91e n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x6bbe91e)
                                                   #2  0x00007f4481bbe94e n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x6bbe94e)
                                                   #3  0x00007f4481bbe816 n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x6bbe816)
                                                   #4  0x00007f447f3c5697 n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x43c5697)
                                                   #5  0x00007f447f3c5581 n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x43c5581)
                                                   #6  0x00007f447f26b4cb n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x426b4cb)
                                                   #7  0x00007f447f2fb64e n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x42fb64e)
                                                   #8  0x00007f447f2fb547 n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x42fb547)
                                                   #9  0x00007f447f2d5645 n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/libcef.so + 0x42d5645)
                                                   [#10](/issue/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/10) 0x0000000000528010 n/a (/var/home/myusernameblahblah/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper + 0x128010)
                                                   ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

I don't seem to be the only user experiencing this issue: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=286544
This Arch Linux forum post seems to be a near exact replica of the issue I am having, although they are using a NVIDIA GPU, I am not.

I also noticed this mostly happens after a "notification toast" (aka desktop notification), although this could just be a coincidence and be totally unrelated.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Launch steam
  2. Wait
  3. Steam UI will close before promptly reopening
Wwaimus 2023-08-10 github

Happens to me as well. Fedora Workstation 38, Steam installation via DNF, GNOME Wayland, Nvidia driver 535.86.05.

It usually does not immediately happen after a new Steam instance launched. It happens to me after I closed a game, I was tinkering with launch commands. Which often happens when the game's properties window closed, it starts to get glitchy.

The first time it happened, around one or two weeks ago, I launched a game normally. But when I get into the game session, Steam suddenly appeared on top of the game, stealing the window focus.

Wwallcarpet40 2023-08-10 github

Confirming issue with my setup too: Fedora 38, Wayland KDE, Radeon 6800XT, using Steam Beta and SteamVR Beta.
When starting Steam after a reboot, Steam starts up and begins downloading shader caches and updates. Crashes in the middle of that. After I start Steam a second time, it completes the shader cache downloading successfully.

I'm mentioning SteamVR here, too, because many times, when I close SteamVR, also the Steam client crashes a few seconds after that. Not sure, if it is related to SteamVR or the game that closes before that trying to upload something to cloud.

Rreturnofblank 2023-08-11 github

This seems to be somewhat recent, although I can't exactly pinpoint when it started showing up.

On my previous computer with an i7-8700k and GTX 1080, which I last used maybe 3 weeks ago, I didn't have this issue.

AAskysoul 2023-08-11 github

it started after i selected beta now its giving headache lmao

Wwaimus 2023-08-14 github

Seems like a temporary fix is to disable the “GPU accelerated rendering in web views” in settings → interface. Although I have tested this workaround in only two sessions since I turned it off.

MMathieuBordere 2023-08-17 github

Same issue on Ubuntu 22.04 with RX 5700 XT.

Eemillindblad 2023-10-17 github

I had this problem and fixed it by running steam --reset

?ghost 2023-10-19 github

I had this problem and fixed it by running steam --reset

seems to work for now Arch Linux 6.5.7-arch1-1

Bbogdanbiv 2024-01-11 github

Seems like a temporary fix is to disable the “GPU accelerated rendering in web views” in settings → interface. Although I have tested this workaround in only two sessions since I turned it off.

steam --reset did nothing for me, but I have two workarounds available:

  • start stream from terminal (Konsole, might vary for you); feels awkward;
  • a temporary fix is to disable the “GPU accelerated rendering in web views” in settings → interface; it may be temporary, but it feels nicer than the first one, in my opinion.

Also from the terminal (stderr / stdout), - needs further investigation:

/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/main.rc:733: error: unexpected identifier 'direction', expected character '}'
/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/hacks.rc:28: error: invalid string constant "normal_entry", expected valid string

Looking for Adwaita direction errors related to unexpected identifier 'direction', expected character '}' lead me to another issue from 2016. It seems this is not an NVidia or AMD driver issue but an incompatibility between libgtk and the packaged theme files for Adwaita. It seems it's not specific to Fedora either because people on Arch and SuSE have been experiencing it too: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4428, https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4554

UPDATE: I kept editing and removing references to the (supposed !!! ) offending lines. This may be the issue or not, however /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/main.rc keeps being regenerated when I launch steam. As such the error message keeps moving around the file as it's being overwritten again and again: unexpected identifier 'direction', expected character '}'

Wwisplite 2025-03-08 github

This issue is happening to me on the latest version of Pop! OS LTS as well. In my case, "GPU accelerated rendering in webviews" was already turned off, and yet Steam continues to do this. I don't get any freezing, and the UI appears to function perfectly fine, it just randomly relaunches itself as I'm using it (which gets extremely annoying in-game).

It also curiously wasn't doing this earlier today. I changed absolutely nothing about my system, I didn't even reboot, and now it's started doing this.

Edit: I take it back, I am unable to launch any games, they just sit on "stop" forever. A temporary fix seems to be launching steam from the terminal, for some reason.

Upstream links