adobe-flashplugin 11.2.202.228-0lucid1freezes firefox display - crashes some webkit programs (depends on cpu)

[Tuomas Lähteenmäki]

Using Firefox 11.0 and the Adobe's Shockwave Flash 11.1.202.228 in youtube. Youtube and all flash sites shows a black box instead of the player. It works fine on Google Chrome.
i'm reinstall this package and nothing happend.

im using Ubuntu lucid 10.04.3 Adobe-flashplugin 11.2.202.228-0lucid1
adobe-flash-properties-gtk works fine.

This package is not stable.
-
This is apparently caused by the use of SSE2 instructions in new versions of adobe flash binaries, but only on older CPU's not implementing SSE2. There is an upstream bug reported for this: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034

Note that this code is binary only outside of Adobe.

Where lernid, and apparently epiphany-browser use webkit they don't catch SIGILL. Both crash and close with the message "Illegal Instruction" sent to the console.

[Tuomas Lähteenmäki (lahtis)]

Where to get a adobe-flashplugin (11.1.102.63-0lucid1) version? This version works. Why versions a removed for apt?

[Peter (gedoens81)]

Same problem here, can't get rid of the broken flash update.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Lex Berger (lexberger)]

Does not seem to be an issue with the Ubuntu package: the bug bug also occurs to me with the libflashplayer.so binary from the Adobe website.

Adobe Flash Player version 11.2.202.228
Linux 32-bit, Firefox 11

Bug does not occur with the updated version 10 of the Flash plugin (Flash 10.3 r183)

[Mikael Wiesel (mikwie)]

Same problem for me.
Downgraded to the previous version by extracting libflashplayer.so from the deb archive: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/11.1.102.63-0lucid1/+build/3260786/+files/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63-0lucid1_i386.deb, replacing the existing /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so with the extracted one.
(By doing this, instead of a "full" downgrade, update-notifier will be quiet until a corrected flashplugin is released.)

I would, of course, have preferred the new version with security updates, but at least flash works again.

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

Given that in some of the cases adobe-flash-11.2.202.228 is plain not working (not the smurfs, nor even logged crashes, it simply doesn't work), please bump 10.3 to the updated version.

Given vulnerabilities, it's sort of security bump, too.

I started to describe the problem on http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-918560.html, but there are no real hints about what's going wrong and in th end it's most likely something only Adobe can fix.

[Ackle (ackle)]

For security, vulnerable ebuilds <11.2.202.228 should be cleaned up as part of bug 410005. Whether or not the maintainer/herd wants to add 10.3.183.18 does not really have anything to do with us, so removing security from cc:

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

It not quite an enhancement, if 11.2.202.228 just doesn't work.
Also, while the forum thread has seen very little input from other parties, it seems that the "not working" part affects only x86 (though it's still hard to say whether the problem lies in CPU or GPU).

[mickoz (michael-kozielski)]

@Mikwie

tried the workaround but doesn't work for me. Seems that the plugin could not be loaded after replacing the libflashplayer.so

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

It seems that it was CPU - all the similar reports seems to come from various types of AthlonXP. The problem reached even the upstream bug tracker.

[mickoz (michael-kozielski)]

Sorry,

it works fine for me with the 11.1.102.63 release. I made the misstake to not care about using amd64 ubuntu version.
So until a fixed release of the package is released this workaround could be used:

for amd64 systems:
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/11.1.102.63-0lucid1/+build/3260785/+files/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63-0lucid1_amd64.deb
ar x adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63-0lucid1_amd64.deb data.tar.gz
tar xf data.tar.gz
cp usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

for i386 systems:
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/11.1.102.63-0lucid1/+build/3260786/+files/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63-0lucid1_i386.deb
ar x adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63-0lucid1_i386.deb data.tar.gz
tar xf data.tar.gz
cp usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

as mentioned above the updater will update to a newer version if avaible.

[Tuomas Lähteenmäki (lahtis)]

Im testing i386 package.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/11.1.102.63-0lucid1/+build/3260786/+files/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63-0lucid1_i386.deb package.

A couple of weeks after the trouble started in the same way. While the older package is in use.
Youtube and all flash sites shows a black box instead of the player. It works fine on Google Chrome.

If im kill the browser process with the command: killall -HUP firefox
and started re-start firefox. Flash working a normal a some time.

im using Ubuntu lucid 10.04.3

[Lack-x (lack-x)]

This wouldn't be the first time Adobe has compiled their binary with a non-AMD-compatible compiler optimization enabled. (See bug #268336) Looks like in this case the issue is that 11.2 is now being compiled using SSE2 instructions, making the binary completely useless for anyone not running a CPU with SSE2.

In the mean time, I have bumped 10.3 to the security-fixed 10.3.183.18 (*and* removed the RPM dependency!).

I'm going to also consider adding a pkg_pretend check and failing the 11.2 install for non-SSE2 CPUs, recommending users package-mask their way back to 10.3.

Leaving this bug open to track the upstream CPU issue and future pkg_pretend changes.

[Lack-x (lack-x)]

Okay, updated the adobe-flash-11.2.202.228 to error out at pkg_pretend time if any local CPU doesn't support the SSE2 instructions, with a suggestions that users mask the 11.2 version to fall back to 10.3 instead.

Leaving this bug open to track the upstream bug(s).

[Tuomas Lähteenmäki (lahtis)]

ALSO version 11.2.202.233-0lucid1 is broken. Youtube and all flash sites shows a black box instead of the player.

[Tuomas Lähteenmäki (lahtis)]

also flashplugin-installer 11.2.202.233ubuntu0.10.04.2 is same error. Not working.

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

I'm having the same symptoms when the new Adobe flashplayer is installed.

Also when I try to load a page with flash with epiphany from a terminal I get "Illegal Instruction"--apparently referring to an SSE2 instruction in flashplayer ( 0x32bfaa0: cvtdq2ps %xmm1,%xmm0), cvtdq2ps is a sse2 instruction and my cpu is too old to have SSE2. See attached from contents fromcat /proc/cpuinfo

Does my experience match that of others reporters for this bug?

My problem appears to match https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034 .

[Mikael Wiesel (mikwie)]

@John S. Gruber:
Great find in the Adobe "bugbase"! Thank you!!
Your experience matches mine exactly, and it all seems to be caused by Adobe using SSE2 instructions.
As the initial bug reporter (https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034) writes, the flash plugin from Google Chrome works OK when used with Firefox.

I downloaded "google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb" from https://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux, opened the deb file and then the data.tar.lzma with the archive manager, and finally extracted libgcflashplugin.so from the /./opt/google/chrome/ folder.
Renamed libgcflashplugin.so to libflashplugin.so and placed it in /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin.
For me, this works perfectly with Firefox!
(I'm only able to test the 32-bit version of the flashplugin...)

[Tuomas Lähteenmäki (lahtis)]

all users add a vote to https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

Happens with both ways of installing the current adobe flash player plugin.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

You can't use Flash in Epiphany since Flash is GTK2 and Epiphany is GTK3. There's a new API that may allow this in a year, plus or minus.

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

@Jeremy Bicha, @Chris Coulson

If affects means that if this were fixed epiphany would display flash -- OK.

But without a fix or circumvention, epiphany crashes (quits) with Illegal Instruction when a web page loads with flash content (on the affected CPUs). That is what met my definition of affected. If you agree, and agree that it's a favorable thing to have a bug search in epiphany turn up this bug, please restore the affects, as you deem appropriate.

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

To reproduce for lernid and epiphany:

epiphany http://pastebin.com/w7mTN5vh (or just opening http://youtube.com)

For lernid, start lernid and then open one of the above url's through the file menu.

In both case the program will crash. Of course, users don't know ahead of time which web pages might include flash content.

If pastbin changes the content, I suppose the flash could be removed from the page, but it crashed both last week and still does now.

I'm able to reproduce this using kvm by using the -cpu pentium2 option in both lucid and precise (precise live cd iso).

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

Crashes (completely terminates) midori with SIGILL at same instruction as above.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

After further investigation I don't recommend using kvm to reproduce the problem--I'm not convinced it faithfully reproduces the cpu capabilities WRT SSE and SSE2cpu capabilities (though it does crash there).

Removing lernid from affected packages since the symptom of the plugin crash is so different for webkit users. Tracking lernid as upstream bug lp: #995695 instead .

[Mattst88-h (mattst88-h)]

Jim, there was a whole thread on the gentoo-dev mailing list about this sse2check (that apparently you did not see?)

Wouldn't it be better if we just did this?

IUSE="... sse2"
REQUIRED_USE="sse2"

[LorenM (elspamocollector)]

I voted on https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034, but I currently have 11.2.202.235 installed.

Do I need to vote on another Adobe bug report to have more impact? If so, please include a link, Thanks.

Since I currently have a problem with 11.2.202.235 instead of 11.2.202.228, do I need to record this on another Launchpad Bug Report?

[ajhcasual (ajh8888)]

Using AMD semprons 1800+.

I am experiencining the problem after running ubuntu update manager, which upgrades firefox 11 to firefox 12 and upgrades Flash player to 11.2.202.235.

Also as a test, I downloaded the non-repository firefox from mozilla website, and then downloaded the same version of Flash from Adobe website (the tar.gz for "other linux". I ran "apt-get purge" for the existing firefox and adobe-flashplugin, then extracted the firefox and flash to my home folder, and the same problem occured. So this shows that it isn't related to the firefox or flash that ubuntu provides, it happens with the versions downloaded direct from the vendor sites.

I have successfully run this same version of flash with the firefox 12 from mozilla's site on another machine, but it was a different hardware model and a different OS too, so now I can't say whether it was the OS (mint 11) or the CPU type that allowed it to function correctly...

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

I also have this issue with an AMD Athlon(TM) XP 2000+.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

The strange thing is that some youtube video does work some does not.

Works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B9_S2ZPhVs
Doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z6YUGGlwtA

[elrond (elrond.)]

@krychek: first video is in HTML5, second not

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

The release of adobe-flash 11.2.202.236 has turned things worse (unless it's firefox 13 related change).
Now flash (playing on youtube) while trying to start playback brings down firefox.

[.cobnet (mattias-campe)]

My parents have the same problem on their "AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2400+". At one moment (after an update I guess), the black frame (where eg. the Youtube video should be) changed to a white frame. But of course white, black or some other colour: it didn't work :-(.

Workaround that I used on my parents pc: install browser-plugin-gnash. At the moment everything seems to work.

[Lack-x (lack-x)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> The release of adobe-flash 11.2.202.236 has turned things worse (unless it's
> firefox 13 related change).
> Now flash (playing on youtube) while trying to start playback brings down
> firefox.

The original issue (Adobe compiles with SSE2 instructions) hasn't been fixed yet (at least I don't think so)

So I have 2 questions:
 - Does your /proc/cpuinfo have SSE2
 - Does the workaround of downgrading to 10.3 still work for you?

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

Well, the x86 one doesn't and 10.3 still works.
The crash is most likely caused by the non-working plugin triggering the problem behind 13.0.1 release.

[george shepherd (chuckleberry)]

OK. Thanx - that (gnash) restored YouTube to my Firefox browser, however, CBC Radio is still not streaming in Firefox. Works fine on Google Chrome, but not Firefox or Opera.

----- Original Message -----
From: ".cobnet" <email address hidden>
Date: Tuesday, June 19, 2012 12:06 pm
Subject: [Bug 968759] Re: adobe-flashplugin 11.2.202.228-0lucid1freezes firefox display - crashes some webkit programs (depends on cpu)
To: <email address hidden>

> My parents have the same problem on their "AMD Athlon(tm) XP
> 2400+". At
> one moment (after an update I guess), the black frame (where eg. the
> Youtube video should be) changed to a white frame. But of course
> white,black or some other colour: it didn't work :-(.
>
> Workaround that I used on my parents pc: install browser-plugin-gnash.
> At the moment everything seems to work.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to a
> duplicate bug report (969690).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/968759
>
> Title:
>   adobe-flashplugin 11.2.202.228-0lucid1freezes firefox
> display -
>   crashes some webkit programs (depends on cpu)
>
> Status in “adobe-flashplugin” package in Ubuntu:
>   Confirmed
> Status in “flashplugin-nonfree” package in Ubuntu:
>   Confirmed
>
> Bug description:
>   Using Firefox 11.0 and the Adobe's Shockwave Flash
> 11.1.202.228 in youtube. Youtube and all flash sites shows a
> black box instead of the player. It works fine on Google Chrome.
>   i'm reinstall this package and nothing happend.
>
>   im using Ubuntu lucid 10.04.3 Adobe-flashplugin
> 11.2.202.228-0lucid1
>   adobe-flash-properties-gtk works fine.
>
>   This package is not stable.
>   -
>   This is apparently caused by the use of SSE2 instructions
> in new versions of adobe flash binaries, but only on older CPU's
> not implementing SSE2. There is an upstream bug reported for
> this: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034
>
>   Note that this code is binary only outside of Adobe.
>
>   Where lernid, and apparently epiphany-browser use webkit
> they don't
>   catch SIGILL. Both crash  and close with the message
> "Illegal  Instruction" sent to the console.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-
> flashplugin/+bug/968759/+subscriptions

[Bernard Decock (decockbernard)]

Also a problem with dpkg -l | grep -i flash
ii flashplugin-installer 11.2.202.236ubuntu0.12.04.1 Adobe Flash Player plugin installer

Problem : Streetview on GoogleMaps doesn't work anylonger : Firefox doesn't show view, Chromium reports a crash. After updating Firefox works ok, Chromium reports an old version, but after confirmation, streetview is enabled

on a cpu cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 6
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1600+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1404.763
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no

Solution : download http://archive.canonical.com/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/adobe-flashplugin_10.2.159.1.orig.tar.gz
and copy to libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow up
bogomips : 2809.52
clflush size : 32
cache_alignment : 32
address sizes : 34 bits physical, 32 bits virtual
power management: ts

[.cobnet (mattias-campe)]

In comment #26 I said "At the moment everything seems to work.". Unfortunately gnash doesn't seem to work for the videos on http://2be.be/superstaar/ :-(. Tested with Firefox.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Well, what can be done is probably to do a CPU check in the download script and download the old version if the CPU does not have the SSE support. See https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410547#c6

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

I just updated my system after 2 months and now youtube doesn't work at all. No html5, no flash with google chrome. Both of them have worked until now. All it says is "Missing Plug-in".

[Praxis (ebiow)]

You can keep the repository version installed and copy the downgraded version of libflashplayer.so to ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so to re-enable flash. I've found at least on my rig disabling Hardware Acceleration doesn't have much effect, nor does adding the line "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0" to /etc/adobe/mms.cfg, but I took both of those actions, as well.

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

The Debian bug was resolved with "won't fix".

[LorenM (elspamocollector)]

Thank you calaferte (lollapalooza). I do not know what your plans are, but thank you for looking into this situation. I hope you can resolve it.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

Flash works fine with Athlon/Sempron CPU's when using older 11.1.102.63 version of flashplugin:)
I've found 11.1.102.63 version at http://://mirror.vlfiles.ru/archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/ - attaching 32-bit deb package to this bugreport.

[J.G. (j.gorski)]

Latest flash that worked was 11.2.202.229 version copied from google chrome /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash directory.
The newest one in the repository of precise is 11.2.202.262, and that one is not working either.
I don't see anywhere the version 270.

[b3nmore (b3nmore)]

Please provide an installer (or adapt the existing) for flashplayer 10.3 for people with cpus without sse2. According to https://www.adobe.com/support/programs/policies/supported.html 10.3 is still supported by adobe (which means it gets security fixes), although I couldn't find anything about how long it will be supported.

Background: There is an one year old upstream bug report: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034, which probably means, that this issue will never be fixed by adobe. So instead of letting people down by either having no working flash at all (if they don't have the necessary knowledge to fix this) or by being forced to use fishy workarounds (like old flash versions with known security issues), this would provide an easy to use and fairly secure fix for this problem.

[b3nmore (b3nmore)]

Unfortunately Adobe will change the version of their extended support release from 10.3 -> 11.7 (on Windows and Mac). From http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html :

"Beginning July 9th, 2013, we will be updating the version of our "extended support release" from Flash Player 10.3 to Flash Player 11.7 for Mac and Windows. To continue to stay current with all available security updates, install the 11.7 extended support release. Or, update to the most recent available release (11.8, etc.) "

This probably means, that the linux 10.3 branch isn't maintained any longer either. In that case, the proposed solution from my previous post is not valid anymore.

[Mattst88-h (mattst88-h)]

(In reply to Matt Turner from comment #6)
> Jim, there was a whole thread on the gentoo-dev mailing list about this
> sse2check (that apparently you did not see?)
>
> Wouldn't it be better if we just did this?
>
> IUSE="... sse2"
> REQUIRED_USE="sse2"

Jeroen,
Now that you're maintaining adobe-flash, might I ask you to consider using REQUIRED_USE="sse2" to allow users to immediately know that SSE2 is required?

[Jeroen Roovers (jer-gentoo)]

(In reply to Matt Turner from comment #10)
> (In reply to Matt Turner from comment #6)
> > Jim, there was a whole thread on the gentoo-dev mailing list about this
> > sse2check (that apparently you did not see?)
> >
> > Wouldn't it be better if we just did this?
> >
> > IUSE="... sse2"
> > REQUIRED_USE="sse2"
>
> Jeroen,
> Now that you're maintaining adobe-flash, might I ask you to consider using
> REQUIRED_USE="sse2" to allow users to immediately know that SSE2 is required?

I don't think Jim ever found the time to consider this solution. I'll let it run rampant in www-plugins/adobe-flash-11.2.202.291-r1 for a while.

[giardia (fabriziosm)]

is still working the workaround using flash from Chrome? i downloaded the deb, extracted libpepflashplayer.so renamed and used in my flashplugin folder but firefox crashes.

[Mattst88-h (mattst88-h)]

Rafał, is there something else that needs to be done for this bug, short of a new flash player that doesn't use SSE2?

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

(In reply to Matt Turner from comment #12)
> Rafał, is there something else that needs to be done for this bug, short of
> a new flash player that doesn't use SSE2?

Don't you mean 'could be' ?

Unfortunately, AFAICT, no. Without Adobe releasing a working version, older machines are stuck with the insecure version.

[Alex Efros (powerman-asdf)]

Maybe it's possible to somehow extract flash plugin from chrome (AFAIK it's compiled without SSE2)? Having to use 10.3 for 1.5 years and without any signs adobe will fix this issue soon is a critical security issue!

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

(In reply to Alex Efros from comment #14)
> Maybe it's possible to somehow extract flash plugin from chrome (AFAIK it's
> compiled without SSE2)? Having to use 10.3 for 1.5 years and without any
> signs adobe will fix this issue soon is a critical security issue!

Not sure, but I seem to recall a post that said that recent versions of chrome flash also have this problem. They're PPAPI - IIRC - anyway, so not really useful outside chrome.

[Jeroen Roovers (jer-gentoo)]

(In reply to Jeroen Roovers from comment #11)
> I'll let it run rampant in www-plugins/adobe-flash-11.2.202.291-r1 for a while.

[Rafał Mużyło (galtgendo)]

The problem with UPSTREAM resolution is obviously that all points toward that upstream doesn't give a damn, even though they're the only one who can really fix this.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Don't worry. Flash is already irrelevant for many users/producers and is soon dead.

[A. Eibach (andi3)]

Hopefully, Marius.
This despotic attitude of Adobe people is simply disgusting, as it's showing here.

BTW, why "Fix Released" in Debian? Trying to crack a good joke??

NO FIX WAS EVER RELEASED. Period. Bart was right that the Debian people cannot do anything about it, as "upstream ain't giving a damn" as pointed out so verbosely (and correctly) above by Rafal.

As Flash is closed source, it would have to be done by Adobe themselves...OR...by some genius who knows about reverse engineering (disassemble everything and kickout all SSE2 shit). But knowing how big these files are, this may become a 1-year job...

*** WARNING *** UNOFFICIAL ***

Back in 2012, I decided to put up a Debian package back in 2013, and I stll get an insanely lot of download requests each week for it (even though I have never pestered any distro teams directly that they should include it)

http://www65.zippyshare.com/v/78802631/file.html

Install it, and it will work OOTB on any non-SSE2 machine. Created from an older maverick package, I simply replaced the Flash bloatware by yet another Chrome build (11.2.202.236) and fired this up to ZippyShare.

[A. Eibach (andi3)]

strike 'Back in 2012, '