libcamerify causes motion daemon to create zombie processes

[Andrei Konovalov]

Hi Dale,

I don't have the answers to your questions. Just some information which might help you (or not).

I have motion running for almost 4 weeks now, 711 videos have been captured (motion detection is configured to
record short videos, not to capture still images). And there are no zombie processes so far.

Hardware:
   RaspberryPi 3B board + RPi camera v1 (ov5647)
OS:
   Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32 bit, bookworm)
kernel:
   Linux version 6.6.20+rpt-rpi-v7 (debian-kernel at lists.debian.org) (gcc-12 (Raspbian 12.2.0-14+rpi1) 12.2.0, GNU ld (GNU 
Binutils for Raspbian) 2.40) #1 SMP Raspbian 1:6.6.20-1+rpt1 (2024-03-07)
motion:
   Version 4.5.1
the ExecStart line from the motion.service:
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/libcamerify /usr/bin/motion
the version of the installed libcamera0.2 and libcamera-tools packages:
   0.2.0+rpt20240215-1


Thanks,
Andrei

On 13.04.2024 12:27, Dale Magee wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was advised to take this issue to the mailing list.
> 
> Please see the issue I raised at https://github.com/raspberrypi/libcamera/issues/129 and the other issues I linked to from 
> there, which descrive the issue I'm having with a bunch of detail.
> 
> I'm keen to get this resolved as it's causing major system instability for me, the entire system becomes unusable when it runs 
> out of memory due to this issue.
> 
> kbingham commented on the ticket that "Not many people use libcamerify - and the more correct route is to use libcamera API's 
> directly, not go through libcamerify".
> 
> The software I'm trying to use does not support libcamera, so that's not an option for me, unfortunately.
> 
> Is there some other preferred method to make a raspberry pi camera 3 show up as a v4l device, and thus able to be used with all 
> the v4l software released over the last couple of decades? I've tried searching for something like that and all I've come up 
> with is libcamerify, but maybe I've missed something?
> 
> I see the patch kbingham points me to, but I'm not sure how I'd compile and install that on raspbian without causing 
> issues/conflicts with the packaged version (e.g if I uninstall libcamera0 with apt, it's going to uninstall everything that 
> depends on it, too, right?). Some guidance/resources on how to achieve that would be super helpful.
> 
> Thanks!