Identifying cause of Eclipse/SWT application crashes

[dhdeangelis]

I am putting effort into tracking the root cause of crashes in an application based on Eclipse/SWT. I write this in the hope I could get some hints from this community.

I use an ETL application (Hale studio) on openSUSE Tumbleweed since many years ago, mostly without problems. This application is based on Eclipse/SWT which is included in its binary distribution, and uses the local GTK environment for its GUI.

Starting from a month ago I experience consistent crashes when clicking on icons, like opening as project file. The observed errors are of two types:

# JRE version: OpenJDK Runtime Environment (23.0.2+7) (build 23.0.2+7-suse-1.1-x8664)
# Java VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (23.0.2+7-suse-1.1-x8664, mixed mode, sharing, tiered, compressed oops, compressed class ptrs, g1 gc, linux-amd64)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [libgdk-3.so.0+0x49879]  gdk_window_get_screen+0x19

# JRE version: OpenJDK Runtime Environment (23.0.2+7) (build 23.0.2+7-suse-1.1-x8664)
# Java VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (23.0.2+7-suse-1.1-x8664, mixed mode, sharing, tiered, compressed oops, compressed class ptrs, g1 gc, linux-amd64)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [libgobject-2.0.so.0+0x3bfd4]  g_type_check_instance_is_a+0x44

For these examples I used Java 23, but the errors are the same on 17 and 21.

I have not been able to track the entire set of changes going on on the OS side, as openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution. However, the onset of these crashes apparently coincides with the time for update from GTK 3.24.43 to 3.24.48, and gt-layer-shell from 0.8.2 to 0.9.0. In fact, I happen to have another machine that has not been updated in many months and is using the older set of these packages and in that machine the application works without crashes.

The application currently uses an old version of Eclipse (2020-03), which has been pointed out as a possible cause of the crashes by the developers. However, I tested and confirmed that Eclipse 2020-03 works without problems in the machine with the latest updates.

I wonder if someone in this community could have a hint on where the root cause of the problem could be.

Thanks in advance