[PATCH] Fix for plasma crashes in Kubuntu

[Alexey Borzenkov]

Hi,

I've recently installed Kubuntu 13.10 (haven't tried it in a while)
and while looking at what's new in KDE almost immediately got some
plasma crashes. While researching how to best report this bug I found
numerous bug reports, which ultimately collapsed into single bug
#302931 marked resolved. So I tried trusty alpha 2, updated, but even
with qt 4.8.5 it still crashed for me. And it's quite easily
reproducible for me:

- Install Kubuntu under VMWare Player
- Change resolution to 1280x800 (not all resolutions seem to trigger this bug!)
- Click on "Show activities" and then "Add widgets"

Starting with a stack trace, which shows the bug happening during
deferred destruction of QDeclarativeElement and then QDeclarativeItem,
I immediately recognized that this happens during traversion of item
change listeners. Long story short I started to look at kubuntu
patches and found that the only candidate is
kubuntu_97_a11y_qt_and_qml_backport.diff, since it seems to add a very
pervasive QDeclarativeAccessibilityUpdater to declarative items, but
the actual instance is located in QDeclarativeEnginePrivate. My hunch
is that QDeclarativeEngine gets destroyed before QDeclarativeItem that
uses its listener and then later when deferred destructor for
QDeclarativeItem kicks in the memory belonging to
QDeclarativeAccessibilityUpdater might be already filled with garbage
and hence the crash during vtable dereference.

I confirmed my hunch by applying a patch, which uses a
single global QDeclarativeAccessibilityUpdater instance (it's not
pretty, but very short), which is possible because
QDeclarativeAccessibilityUpdater is basically stateless, all it does
is forwarding to QAccessible functions (btw, why does it even inherit
from QObject? It doesn't have to, not without all that commented
code!).

Sure enough, after 9 hours of compiling (so I would have a patched and
simply recompiled kubuntu 13.10 libqt4-declarative packages) I see no
crashes with my patch and 100% reproducible crashes without my patch.

If the patch is not acceptable (I'm not sure it won't trip valgrind or
something like that), what would be a good place for
QDeclarativeAccessibilityUpdate instance? One idea is
QDeclarativeItemPrivate, but wouldn't it be weird for QDeclarativeItem
to basically listen to itself? :)

Here's my patch on Ubuntu pastebin against Kubuntu 13.10 :

http://paste.ubuntu.com/6955643/

Best regards,
Alexey.