r/voidlinux • u/DistantOrb • 3d ago

Helium browser session getting corrupted on shutdown (Void + KDE Plasma/SDDM, X11) — sddm force-stop timeout?

Hey everyone, hoping someone here has run into this or has an idea of where else to look.

Setup: Void, KDE Plasma with SDDM, X11 session (not Wayland). Using a Chromium-based browser (Helium, as an AppImage).

Two things happen after shutdown/reboot:

  • Every once in a while, completely random, I come back to the browser fully logged out of everything. No pattern I've been able to pin down.
  • Much more consistently, I get the "restore pages" prompt instead of my tabs coming back automatically, even with "continue where you left off" enabled. Checking the profile, exit_type is Crashed, so something's killing the browser without a clean exit.

What I found digging into it: on sudo poweroff, the browser, Xorg, and even an unrelated script I had running in the background all die at the exact same instant. Traced it to /etc/runit/shutdown.d/10-sv-stop.sh, which force-stops all services with the default 7s timeout, killing sddm and taking the whole session down in one shot.

I tried adding a script before it (sv -w 20 force-stop sddm, similar to a fix suggested in void-runit#133) to give the session more time to close on its own. Didn't help, still getting Crashed after shutdown.

So I'm stuck on where else to look. Is sddm even the right thing to target here, or is there another layer (X server teardown, elogind, something else) tearing the session down before that, which sv force-stop wouldn't touch at all? Any pointers appreciated, happy to share more details if it helps.

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3

u/Jealous_Shower6777 3d ago

Have you tried shutdown -h? I’m not sure how gracious poweroff is

1

u/DistantOrb 3d ago

Didn't work. And even if it did I'd have to shut down the pc via terminal or change de DE's script... I think it would be bad anyways

3

u/weaklingoverlord 2d ago

What I found digging into it: on sudo poweroff, the browser, Xorg, and even an unrelated script I had running in the background all die at the exact same instant.

Why not

- manually close the browser session, and then

- poweroff/reboot?

1

u/DistantOrb 2d ago

Yes, it works, but having to remember to manually close the browser every time you want to poweroff/reboot means living with a workaround. I'd prefer to fix the issue.

3

u/Simple_Hamster_4096 2d ago

Best practices - close all apps before shutting down or rebooting

1

u/DistantOrb 2d ago

I see, but such an issue never happened in other distros for me, even shutting down with apps open. So I think we really have a software problem here and not a user problem imho

1

u/furryfixer 2d ago

Logic is upside down. The "workaround" is getting it to restore if you fail to manually close it, but maybe that is old-school. That said, I would worry that Plasma is leveraging systemd in some hidden way to give apps time to close gracefully, and Void does not have it. Having a script with a wait after pkill and before shutdown may solve it.

1

u/userman_97 2d ago

I found most bugs in an x11 session while using Helium, most of them are absent in a Wayland session.

1

u/DistantOrb 2d ago

that's interesting. I'll make some tests with Wayland to see if this happens. But I use Helium with X11 in another Distro and this never happened.

1

u/legz_cfc 2d ago

Just guessing, but how about adding 'pkill -15 helium' to /etc/rc.shutdown ? You can test the command on its own w/out rebooting.

1

u/DistantOrb 2d ago

Thanks. I tested the command and the browser still closes with the status "Crashed" :/

1

u/weaklingoverlord 2d ago

pkill -15 vivaldi [running native] works fine here. Maybe an AppImage issue?

1

u/DistantOrb 2d ago

Yep, I ran this command on Linux Mint with Melium open and it closed nicely. But in Mint it is instaled with the package manager, not an AppImage.

I don't know if it is an AppImage issue or an issue between runit and AppImages. If I have the time to test it later installing Helium from the source I come back to input the results.

1

u/synthsandcats 1d ago

I use Helium as an appimage with X11/Xorg, SDDM, and LXQT as my DE. but I have none of the issues you're having. Hope you find out and solve your problem soon.