[gfx] Crash running Firefox with 3D drivers installed

[Steve Magoun]

We see frequent application crashes on Menlow when the 3D drivers are on the system.

To reproduce:
1) Install the proprietary 8.04.1a UME image
2) Open an xterm, run 'sudo apt-get install firefox'
3) Launch firefox via 'firefox --sync'
4) Visit youtube.com; watch movies. Firefox will crash quickly, <1min

We have reproduced on a D1 crown beach with a 15" CRT at 1024x768 attached. We cannot reproduce if we move Xpsb.so aside and reboot.

Firefox will crash without the sync option, but the sync option seems to exacerbate the problem. We do not think the problem is related to Flash or YouTube, we get this crash on other websites as well (google.com, yahoo.com).

We have observed other applications crashing as well, such as the terminal and the X server itself. As with the firefox crash, removing Xpsb.so seems to fix the problem.

[Steve Magoun (smagoun)]

Updating to xserver-xorg-video-psb_0.15.0-0ubuntu1~804um4 doesn't fix the problem.

[Steve Magoun (smagoun)]

Some stuff we've tried (that didn't work):

* Disabled Xv with this patch:

Index: xserver-xorg-video-psb-0.15.0/src/psb_video.c
===================================================================
--- xserver-xorg-video-psb-0.15.0.orig/src/psb_video.c 2008-10-03 10:46:52.000000000 -0400
+++ xserver-xorg-video-psb-0.15.0/src/psb_video.c 2008-10-03 10:47:16.000000000 -0400
@@ -1044,6 +1044,8 @@
     XF86VideoAdaptorPtr adaptor = NULL;
     int num_adaptors;

+ return NULL;
+
     xvBrightness = MAKE_ATOM("XV_BRIGHTNESS");
     xvContrast = MAKE_ATOM("XV_CONTRAST");
     xvSaturation = MAKE_ATOM("XV_SATURATION");

* Disabled hyperthreading (boot with kernel cmdline option 'maxcpus=1'
* Artificially throttled CPU to 1.067Ghz and later 800Mhz via 'echo 1067000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-1]/cpufreq/scaling_max_frequency'
* All combinations of the above

I noticed that I couldn't reproduce the crash when running firefox using very verbose strace output:
'strace -f -s 128 -o ff.strace firefox --sync', which led me to think this might be a timing issue (hence the tests with low CPU clockspeed + HT turned off)

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

From Woei

I just observed two crashes using midbrowser.
Error message is the same as Firefox:

Midbrowser: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0
Segmentation fault

[CheonwoeiNg (cheon-woei-ng)]

More info:

Could not reproduce issue on moblin beta 4 (kernel is 2.6.22-31-menlow-default)with PV 2.1 drivers on D2 Menlow board.

Able to reproduce issue on 8.04.1a with PV2.2 on D2 Menlow board by simply moving the mouse in circular motion (sometimes crashes in a few seconds, sometimes crashes around 30 seconds to 1 minutes).