Unexpected crashes in i3

[MiniX16]

Summary

When opening more than 2 terminals in the same desktop they all crash.

When closing an existing terminal all the other cool-retro-term terminals crash.

When switching focus between windows in i3 I briefly toggle borders via a small script so the focused window is obvious. If either the window losing focus or gaining focus is cool-retro-term, both cool-retro-term windows crash immediately when the border change is applied.

Environment

• i3 window manager (X11)
• cool-retro-term 2.0.0-beta1 AppImage
• OS: Arch Linux (X11)

Notes

• Other terminal emulators (only tested in alacritty) do not crash in any of these actions.
• The closing problem only occurs if I close it using the key binding (configured in the /.config/i3/config) file or if I close a tab manually. When closing it with the exit command it works correctly.

[MiniX16]

Maybe it has something to do with x11 or i3

[newjack57]

Same issue .
I3
Arch 6.18.6
opening 2nd instance immediately dumps to systemd core dump signal 6/ABRT
Opened from within first process. Tried seperate process still crashes immediately.

[Swordfish90]

Interesting. Are you able to reproduce this only from the AppImage or is the same issue happening even when you build it from source (thinking some conflicting library shenanigans here).

Also, all the cool-retro-term windows will always run in the same process. This is done to keep the effect and settings in sync basically. Even if you launch another window, the second process simply tells the first one to open a new window and then closes immediately.

[MiniX16]

Yeah, this happens also when building from source.

Lately I have been thinking in moving to hyperland and finally did it. I still have the same exact issue in hyperland with wayland of course.

So maybe it is not an i3 issue, maybe is more an arch thing.

[Swordfish90]

The only workaround I can think of would be to launch it without wayland:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb ./cool-retro-term.AppImage

Sadly I can't reproduce the issue, but I'll keep this one open in case someone with the right OS wants to dig deeper into it to understand what's causing this.

[Cyph3rByte]

That's happening to me too. I'm using I3 on Arch Linux.

[nowhereandgoodbye]

Hi, is there anything i can do on my end to help with solving this? I am not a programer but can test. I have confirmed cool-retro-term crashes on slackware and also on Arch. It crashes on hyprland, awesome, and bspwm. I have a amdgpu so its not a nvidia issue. I have tried several kernels. I tried turning off burn in in settings and it did nothing.

I am currently back to using the Version 1.2.0 and it works fine.

[nowhereandgoodbye]

This is what claude says about the crashing. Maybe it will help yall more than me.

● Here's the bottom line:

This is a Mesa/kernel RDNA 4 driver bug, not a CRT bug. Your system is bleeding-edge across the board - kernel 6.18.9, Mesa 25.3.5, Qt 6.10.2, and the RX 9070 XT (Navi 48) which only launched in
early 2025. CRT 2.0's Qt6 shaders trigger a GPU virtual memory fault (SQC data PERMISSION_FAULTS) that crashes the hardware regardless of:

• OpenGL or Vulkan
• ACO or LLVM shader compiler
• Hardware or software rendering
• Wayland or XWayland

CRT v1.2.0 (Qt5) works because Qt5's SceneGraph manages shader resources differently and doesn't trigger the bug.

What we tried and ruled out:

• QSG_RENDER_LOOP=threaded/basic - crash
• QSG_RHI_BACKEND=opengl/vulkan - crash
• GALLIUM_DRIVER=llvmpipe - crash
• LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 - crash
• RADV_DEBUG=llvm - crash
• QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb - crash
• Source build with system Qt 6.10.2 - crash
• QT_QUICK_BACKEND=software - works but no shader effects (useless)

Recommendation: Stick with CRT v1.2.0 for now. This should be filed as a Mesa bug on gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa against the RDNA 4 / Navi 48 driver. It'll likely get fixed as the RDNA 4 support matures.

[vabenil]

Same issue on sway (Wayland) under Arch Linux from the Arch Linux pacman package.

Considering on the fact that his happens in i3 and bspwn also means probably this issue is independent of X11 or Wayland and has to do more on how Window managers handle windowing differently.

Not sure if it has anything to do with Arch Linux, my guess is that other distros package managers are still using an older version and therefore haven't been affected yet.

For me personally I have noticed that the application crashes only when the application is forced by the WM to change size.
For example if force fullscreen it crashes. If I open a new window in the workspace (therefore halving the size of the cool retro term window) it crashes, if I try to resize it it also crashes.

Any resizing operation causes an instant crash.

So I think it's a fair assumption that there's some problem with the cool retro term not been able to handle resizing events by Window Managers like i3, bspwm, sway and others.

A check on any window handling code changes on the past 2 months should be a good starting point.

EDIT

I have replicated this same issue after manually building the master branch.

I tried replicating the issue by retracing commits to search the commit that caused this but after 2 hours failing to run (not to build, likely because I have both Qt5 and Qt6 installed) I simply gave up, I am no Qt guy.