Chromium Lock Prevents Bolt from Launching After Improper Shutdown

[Galdanwing]

Hi there,

Longtime user and fan of Bolt here — thank you for the great work!

I'm encountering an intermittent issue where Bolt refuses to start after my PC is shut down unexpectedly or crashes. Upon reboot, launching Bolt fails silently, and generating a report produces no usable logs.

After some digging, I found the following error when running Bolt manually via Flatpak:

[...]
[ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(353)] The profile appears to be in use by another Chromium process (2) on another computer (fedora-1.home). Chromium has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Chromium.
[...]

It turns out that the Chromium engine is placing a lock file at:

~/.var/app/com.adamcake.Bolt/data/bolt-launcher/CefCache/SingletonLock

When the system is not cleanly shut down, this lock remains in place and prevents Bolt from starting on the next boot. The workaround I've been using is to delete this file manually (or uninstall/reinstall Bolt and clear the config), which resolves the issue.

System details:
    OS: Fedora Linux 42
    DE: KDE Plasma 6.3.4 (Wayland)
    Kernel: 6.14.4-300.fc42.x86_64
    Flatpak Bolt version: latest available
    CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
    GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
    RAM: 30.6 GiB

If there's any way I can help fix or debug this further (e.g. automating removal of stale locks, fallback handling), please let me know!

Thanks again for this amazing app.

[Adamcake]

I've never come across this before, but on my system, SingletonLock is a broken symlink that gets created along with two other broken symlinks:

And all three of these get deleted when I close the program.

Searching online I found a few people complaining about this same issue but not many proposed solutions. I did find this thread where someone suggests that the issue is caused by the disk being full. (df -h will show mount points and disk usage of each one, you're looking for the one mounted on /)

[Galdanwing]

There's plenty of fs available:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p3  1.9T  1.4T  519G  73% /
devtmpfs        4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /dev
tmpfs            16G  8.0K   16G   1% /dev/shm
efivarfs        128K   64K   60K  52% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
tmpfs           6.2G  2.5M  6.2G   1% /run
tmpfs           1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/systemd-journald.service
tmpfs            16G  4.0K   16G   1% /tmp
/dev/nvme0n1p3  1.9T  1.4T  519G  73% /home
/dev/nvme0n1p2  974M  361M  546M  40% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1  599M   20M  580M   4% /boot/efi
tmpfs           1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/systemd-resolved.service
tmpfs           3.1G  200K  3.1G   1% /run/user/1000

I think I narrowed it down to shutting down the PC with Bolt (Not Runelitle) open causing the issue, for me atleast.

[Adamcake]

Are these symlinks in your case too? Or actual files? And if it's a link, what does SingletonLock link to?

It really should be putting this type of thing in /run or /tmp. Maybe there's still a way to get it to do that.

[Adamcake]

I figured this out with someone on Discord. It's a chromium bug, caused by having a hyphen (-) character in your hostname. You can find your hostname by running hostname in a terminal. If you have a - character anywhere in there, you have this issue.

I'll try and find the origin of this issue (could be chromium, CEF, or one of several patchsets...) but that's going to take a long time for any kind of fix to materialise. I know it's silly, but I would advise changing your hostname if at all possible.

[Galdanwing]

Ah, got it — my hostname is fedora.home:

Galdanwing@fedora  ~  hostname fedora.home

The good news is I discovered I can just delete the lock file myself: rm ~/.var/app/com.adamcake.Bolt/data/bolt-launcher/CefCache/SingletonLock That makes things much easier!

Reinstalling Bolt and RuneLite every few days was getting a bit tedious, so this is a nice workaround for now. 😊

[Adamcake]

I thought the issue was the hyphen because SingletonLock uses a hyphen as a delimiter, but actually that doesn't seem to be the issue, the function that parses it looks logically sound to me.

Maybe the issue is the period. To quote the POSIX definition of a hostname:

Valid characters for hostnames are ASCII(7) letters from a to z, the digits from 0 to 9, and the hyphen (-). A hostname may not start with a hyphen.

It doesn't say dots are allowed. Although it does say on a previous line that a hostname is a dot-separated list of subdomains, so that seems contradictory...

It does seem that changing the hostname to an alphanumeric one fixes this issue, but I can't exactly see why at the moment, which means I can't try to fix it.