Hello,
Houdini 20.5.584 crashes with SIGSERV (signal 11) crashed multiple times in the past and crashes even with the latest version.
Every time when it happens is when I use wall generator created by me. Most of the times (but not always) the crash occurred when Karma is used to visualize the result.
At the time of the crash, the video memory usage is 7.8 out of 8 gigs of vram.
The video card that I use is nVidia 4070 laptop video card with 8GB vRAM on ASUS TUF A16 laptop wit 64 GB of ram and plenty of free disk space. About half of the RAM it is used during the generation process.
I never witnessed any crash with Mantra which I am forced to use now.

It seems to me that Houdini crashes because at some point in time it is not possible to get more vRAM but I am not sure about that.
If that is the case, how can I disable the usage of my video card and force Karma to work on the CPU only?
I know that there is Karma CPU, but it produces different result for me than Karma XPU. I am not sure why, but the result that I get from Karma XPU is much superior.
I tried the following option to disable the GPU, but it does not seem to work:



Below are the contents of the log file that was created by Houdini itself.

Crash report from 3aedab6e; Houdini FX Version 20.5.584
Uptime 16750 seconds
Thu May 29 16:34:45 2025
Caught signal 11

Traceback from 9224 ThreadId=0x77f8b4267300
AP_Interface::coreDumpChaser(UTsignalHandlerArg) <libHoudiniUI.so>
AP_Interface::si_CrashHandler::chaser(UTsignalHandlerArg) <libHoudiniUI.so>
signalCallback(UTsignalHandlerArg) <libHoudiniUT.so>
UT_Signal::UT_ComboSignalHandler::operator()(int, siginfo_t*, void*) const <libHoudiniUT.so>
UT_Signal::processSignal(int, siginfo_t*, void*) <libHoudiniUT.so>
__sigaction <libc.so.6>
RV_OGLInteropTextureBase::beginTransferToVk(RE_Render*) <libHoudiniUI.so>
DM_VPortAgent::renderPickBuffer(RE_RenderContext, bool, bool, unsigned int, GA_PrimCompat::TypeMask, UT_Array<GUI_DetailLook*> const*, GR_ObjectPickFlags const&) <libHoudiniAPPS3.so>
DM_VPortAgent::singlePickObject(RE_Render*, int, int, GR_PickRecord&, GR_ObjectPickFlags const&, double*, UT_Array<GUI_DetailLook*> const*) <libHoudiniAPPS3.so>
DM_Viewport::singlePickObject(int, int, GR_PickRecord&, GR_ObjectPickFlags const&, double*, UT_Array<GUI_DetailLook*> const*) <libHoudiniAPPS3.so>
DM_ViewState::pickLockedScrollPosition(DM_Viewport&, int, int, UT_Vector3T<double>&) <libHoudiniAPPS3.so>
DM_ViewState::cameraModeHandleMouseEvent(UI_Event*) <libHoudiniAPPS3.so>
BM_Viewport::handleMouseEvent(UI_Event*) <libHoudiniAPPS2.so>
BM_Viewport::beginSelect(UI_Event*) <libHoudiniAPPS2.so>
UI_Window::handleEvent(UI_Event*) <libHoudiniUI.so>
UI_Queue::processNextEvent() <libHoudiniUI.so>
UI_Queue::drain() <libHoudiniUI.so>
UI_Queue::eventLoop() <libHoudiniUI.so>
main <libHoudiniUI.so>
__libc_init_first <libc.so.6>

Did you manage to fix this? I'm having the same issue, H20.5 and 21 are crashing when doing really basic tasks with signal 11 / run out of memory. Never had this many crashes compared to when I was still using my 1070

osenski
If that is the case, how can I disable the usage of my video card and force Karma to work on the CPU only?

FYI
you can do this via the KARMA_XPU_DEVICES envvar
so...
KARMA_XPU_DEVICES=embree (will only make use of the CPU device)

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/karma_xpu.html#disablingdevices [www.sidefx.com]

rustytoe
Did you manage to fix this? I'm having the same issue, H20.5 and 21 are crashing when doing really basic tasks with signal 11 / run out of memory. Never had this many crashes compared to when I was still using my 1070

I was forced to move to Windows and all crashes disappeared. Before that, I contacted the support. The guy from the support tried my houdini file on the same environment and he told me that it crashed exactly in the same way. My suspicion is that there are problems with the nVidia driver for Linux.
I did not had time to investigate further, but one strange thing that I found is that Unreal Engine 5 also performed very poorly. So, I just dropped Linux temporarily for Windows.