Workaround for Wine/World Of Warcraft Crashing on Linux 64bit systems with > 4gb of RAM.

I recently got a new computer with 8gb of RAM, and since then World Of Warcraft crashed very often with out of memory errors.
After banging my head for hours every time I crashed in dalaran or coming out of the arenas, I finally discovered setarch(8).

Usage: setarch  [options] [program [program arguments]]                                                               

Options:
 -h, --help               displays this help text
 -v, --verbose            says what options are being switched on
 -R, --addr-no-randomize  disables randomization of the virtual address space
 -F, --fdpic-funcptrs     makes function pointers point to descriptors       
 -Z, --mmap-page-zero     turns on MMAP_PAGE_ZERO                            
 -L, --addr-compat-layout changes the way virtual memory is allocated        
 -X, --read-implies-exec  turns on READ_IMPLIES_EXEC                         
 -B, --32bit              turns on ADDR_LIMIT_32BIT                          
 -I, --short-inode        turns on SHORT_INODE                               
 -S, --whole-seconds      turns on WHOLE_SECONDS                             
 -T, --sticky-timeouts    turns on STICKY_TIMEOUTS                           
 -3, --3gb                limits the used address space to a maximum of 3 GB 
     --4gb                ignored (for backward compatibility only)
setarch i386 -3 -L -B -R wine wow.exe -opengl

While it isn’t a perfect solution, it work’s for the most part.

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3 Responses to “Workaround for Wine/World Of Warcraft Crashing on Linux 64bit systems with > 4gb of RAM.”

  1. Dan Says:

    Thanks for this, I’ll be giving this a go tonight. Sounds like it’ll work, certainly much better than limiting how much RAM the kernel addresses at boot time with a grub argument.

  2. Dan Says:

    Welp, I’ve been trying this for several weeks, and noticed no noticeable improvement in my crash prevention, despite tweaking every parameter available. I’m reverting to limiting RAM at boot time for the time-being. :-\

  3. OneOfOne Says:

    It didn’t prevent it for me, however it made it a lot less, not sure why it didn’t work for you, did you have something else running in wine before you started it like that?

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