Comment 107 for bug 973096

Hi Alberto,

There seem to be a lot of reports here, and it's hard to tell whether they're all related. We are currently investigating reports of a regression with very recent versions of Flash where the X server can crash when playing videos, which it sounds like many of the users here are reporting, but there are many other reports here which sound completely unrelated to Flash, including the post from the original reporter.

The root cause of the Flash regression is not yet known, but in the meantime, we have found that it's possible to work around this particular issue by disabling Flash's use of VDPAU for hardware acceleration of video playback.

It sounds like a lot of people here are experiencing general stability problems with Unity and the NVIDIA driver, and using other desktop sessions, older drivers, or different GPU hardware/drivers avoids these issues. I haven't personally seen issues like this on any of my machines running Unity on Precise, nor am I aware of any reports like this coming from our internal testing on various distributions, including Ubuntu.

I understand that the reports are of crashes which are random and sporadic in nature, but any efforts to isolate specific workflows or actions that seem to trigger the crashes or at least make it more likely that X or the desktop session will crash so that these problems can be reproduced on demand will make it much easier to investigate what is happening. If there appear to be multiple problems that share similar symptoms ("Nvidia driver causes xorg crash" can describe a multitude of issues), they should preferably be separated out into distinct bug reports. (It also seems like at least some people on this bug report are reporting issues with non-NVIDIA drivers and/or hardware: these reports, at least, definitely don't belong in an "Nvidia driver causes xorg crash" report.)