Thorium was "closing and dying randomly" with no evidence anywhere.
Two independent structural causes, both now fixed:
1. Crashpad was never enabled -- no crash_reporting consent key and an
empty crash DB, so no minidump was ever written.
2. stderr from a dmenu/.desktop launch reaches no terminal and no
journal. The only Thorium lines ever seen in the journal came from a
systemd-launched instance, which is why they survived.
browser-preexec-wrapper.sh now gives every Chromium-family launch its own
log under $XDG_STATE_HOME/browser-crash-logs: a VRAM/RAM/kernel/driver
snapshot before start, the browser's stderr, and on exit the exit code,
decoded signal, and a SECOND VRAM snapshot. Those two snapshots plus the
signal are the discriminator between the live hypotheses -- a VRAM death
shows NVRM/NV_ERR_NO_MEMORY or near-full VRAM at exit, a stale-binary
death shows SIGSEGV with the GPU idle. Root cause is deliberately NOT
asserted here; the next crash decides it from evidence.
Three details that are load-bearing rather than incidental:
- The exit record is written from a signal trap, not inline after
`wait`. If the wrapper itself is killed, an inline block never runs
and the log ends mid-stream with no verdict -- indistinguishable
from a browser that is still running.
- The browser is a direct redirect, NOT a pipe into a size filter: in
a pipeline `wait` reports the last element's status, discarding the
browser's signal, which is the one fact worth capturing.
- Logs are capped by bytes as well as count. Measured: ~2 MB per 45s
of navigation (65% VERBOSE1 net/TLS chatter), ~0 while idle. Count
alone would not bound disk use, and a full disk causes exactly the
random deaths under investigation.
setup_periodic_system.sh: rewrite Chromium "app mode" .desktop entries
(Exec=/opt/<browser>/...) to go through /usr/local/bin. These are
auto-generated and bypass the wrapper entirely, so neither the flags file
nor the logging applied to them -- five Thorium entries were found still
launching without the --disable-gpu-compositing mitigation added on
2026-07-25, two weeks after the fact. Runs on every install because
Chromium regenerates the files.
pacman_whitelist.txt: allow the exact package name `librewolf`. The
`librewolf` keyword stays blocked, as do all other Firefox forks. It is
LeechBlock-enforced via /etc/librewolf/policies (force_installed), so
this is not an unfiltered escape hatch; it is needed because Chromium's
MV2 sunset ends full uBlock Origin with all filter lists, which the Gecko
build keeps.
Verified: shellcheck clean, no lint suppressions; fake-browser SIGSEGV
and wrapper-SIGTERM both produce a verdict; trim watchdog bounds a
runaway log; kill -SEGV on the real /opt/thorium-browser/thorium wrote
"exit code: 139 / died on signal: 11 (SEGV)"; librewolf installs and
loads with uBO + LeechBlock active.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ME5ZkgWjFvPZrUwMpVZM3e
Vendored makepkg's run_pacman() waits on /var/lib/pacman/db.lck existence
with no timeout BEFORE invoking pacman, so an orphaned lock hangs
`makepkg -i` forever ("Pacman is currently in use, please wait...") and
the pacman wrapper's stale-lock cleanup never gets a turn. Wrap makepkg
(mirroring the pacman-wrapper pattern) to clear an orphaned lock up front.
- Extract stale-lock logic into shared pacman_lock_lib.sh; pacman_wrapper
sources it after integrity verification and it is in the SHA256 manifest
- makepkg_wrapper: pre-flight clear for -i/--install; bypass on FAKEROOTKEY
and non-install; FAIL OPEN if the lib is missing (never brick makepkg)
- Cross-user pacman_process_running() pgrep guard: unprivileged makepkg can
detect a root pacman its own fuser cannot see (avoids removing a live lock)
- Upgrade survival: rewrap hook (Install/Upgrade only) + check_makepkg_wrapper
drift verifier + both wrappers wired into the hourly periodic driver
- Fix reorg path bugs: stale ~/linux-configuration periodic path,
$CONFIG_DIR/hosts -> scripts/periodic_background/hosts, test WRAPPER_DIR;
refresh .orig only when target isn't already our symlink (no exec loop)
- Tests: test_makepkg_wrapper.sh (18) incl. hook Operation validity; add
lib-integrity coverage to test_pacman_wrapper_security.sh (also path-fixed)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JsCs1GUyiinA7bg68YvAh1
- Move all linux_configuration scripts into two semantic categories:
- single_use/: scripts run once manually (fresh install, fixes, setup)
- periodic_background/: scripts run by systemd timers or daemons
- Preserve existing subdirectory structure within each category
- Fix lib/common.sh source paths for new directory depths
- Fix CONFIG_DIR depth in setup_periodic_system.sh and check_and_enable_services.sh
- Update all references in tests, fresh-install/main.sh, nix modules, and docs
- Fix check_polling_antipatterns.sh false positives (||, regex |, case patterns, jq strings)
- Fix pre-existing mypy exclusion path and type annotations for moved tools/ directory
- Rewrite check_polling_antipatterns.sh using awk (no bash regex loops); add require_serial: true
