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Viewer fails to launch on eglfs/linuxfb boards, exhausting its attempt budget (not covered by #3240) #3266

Description

@vpetersson-bot

Summary

The viewer repeatedly fails to launch on eglfs / linuxfb boards and exhausts its attempt budget. This is the highest-volume live issue in Sentry and is not addressed by PR #3240, whose watchdog early-returns on non-Wayland boards.

Sentry: ANTHIAS-D (443 events, WebviewLaunchError: AnthiasViewer did not start after 30 attempts) and ANTHIAS-19 (28 events, the 3-attempt variant). Both still firing; ANTHIAS-D incremented during the 2026-08-07 triage sweep itself.

Affected hardware

device_type pi3, pi3-64, pi4-64, pi2 (and one pi5 on the 19 group); kernel_machine both aarch64 and armv7l; both balena=true and false. These are the eglfs and linuxfb display stacks — #3240's recovery is Wayland-only, so it cannot fire here.

Notes for whoever picks this up

  • The differing attempt counts across sibling issues (3 vs 30) are the max_attempts parameter changing over time, not two distinct defects. load_browser raises after range(1, max_attempts + 1) is exhausted.
  • Two sibling signatures — ANTHIAS-F (325 events) and ANTHIAS-1C (42) — were resolved in the 2026-08-07 sweep because they genuinely stopped occurring a month ago. ANTHIAS-D and ANTHIAS-19 were deliberately left open because they have not.
  • The failure modes recorded in the messages differ and are worth separating before fixing: "did not emit AnthiasViewer started" versus "exited before emitting". The second is a crash, the first is a hang or a missed handshake.
  • Related-looking but separately resolved: the GDBus NoReply cluster (ANTHIAS-42/3/3H/48, ~877 events) stopped at the same 2026-07-08 boundary. If this turns out to share a root cause with those, that boundary is a useful clue about what changed.

Suggested first step

Reproduce on the armhf testbed (Pi 2) and a 64-bit eglfs board (Pi 3-64 / Pi 4), which are the two stacks carrying the volume, and capture the viewer log around the failed handshake to establish which of the two failure modes dominates.

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