[#FP-146] Freezes Firefox on Linux

Flash Player

Freezes Firefox on Linux

Created: 04/21/08 03:08 PM Updated: 02/27/09 12:19 AM

Component/s:

Video Playback

Security Level:

Public (All JIRA Users )

File Attachments:

trace.txt (19 kb)

Severity:	Crash/Hang
Reproducibility:	Intermittent
Discoverability:	Medium
Found in Version:	Flash Player 9 - 9_0_124_0
Milestone:	Flash Player 9
Affected OS(s):	Linux - All Linux
Steps to Reproduce:	« Hide Steps to reproduce: 1. Visit www.youtube.com 2. Start clicking video after video, only allowing a few seconds of playback on each. 3. Anywhere from 2 to several hundred videos and you will have a complete browser lockup. Actual Results: Firefox must be forcefully killed. The problem, experienced by many, is largely explained reproducible as playing a video half way and then navigating away from the page. It seems that this problem can actually occur anytime the Flash Player is running inside a page. The relation to youtube is a matter of popularity and thus higher incidents with that particular site. Expected Results: The browser should be able to navigate, play, and stop playing Flash when navigating away from the page containing Flash Player content. Workaround (if any): There are numerous theories that some swear by. The problem seems to persist in most. if not all. Problem is present in Firefox 2.x - 3.x. Some interesting research into the cause: http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/267 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/192888 Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. [Switching to Thread -1221932464 (LWP 6462)] 0xac6ec31c in ?? () from /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so Show » Steps to reproduce: 1. Visit www.youtube.com 2. Start clicking video after video, only allowing a few seconds of playback on each. 3. Anywhere from 2 to several hundred videos and you will have a complete browser lockup. Actual Results: Firefox must be forcefully killed. The problem, experienced by many, is largely explained reproducible as playing a video half way and then navigating away from the page. It seems that this problem can actually occur anytime the Flash Player is running inside a page. The relation to youtube is a matter of popularity and thus higher incidents with that particular site. Expected Results: The browser should be able to navigate, play, and stop playing Flash when navigating away from the page containing Flash Player content. Workaround (if any): There are numerous theories that some swear by. The problem seems to persist in most. if not all. Problem is present in Firefox 2.x - 3.x. Some interesting research into the cause: http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/267 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/192888 Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. [Switching to Thread -1221932464 (LWP 6462)] 0xac6ec31c in ?? () from /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so
Language Found:	English
Bugbase Id:	none
Triaged:	No
Participants:	bill goldberg, bryan allen, Colin Guthrie, David Khoury, Edwin Wong, ekot, Jonathan Rosen, Kai Blaschke, Kevin Cantu, Luka, Paul Vouga and Tit Couille
Browser:	Firefox 2.x

All

Comments

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bill goldberg - [04/27/08 05:04 PM ]

This one (together with the fullscreen cpu hog thing) is a thing most, if not all linux users experience with the crappy flash player for linux.

It really needs to be fixed ASAP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Kai Blaschke - [04/29/08 03:42 PM ]

I'd like to add my experience with this bug, also confirming it.

I'm using the current version (9.0.124) of the flash player. My OS is Gentoo Linux x86 (Testing), with all current updates installed. Pulseaudio version is 0.9.10.

As reported by others around the internet, crashes occur when leaving a page which contains flash content. Crashes happen much more frequently when a FLV video is played within the plugin, thus highly affecting YouTube and other video sites.

I tried to use strace to produce a trace file which may give a clue on when the crash happens, but while dumping the trace it's almost impossible to trigger a crash. As Firefox and the flash plugin run very slowly while tracing, this could probably be a timing issue.

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Colin Guthrie - [05/09/08 03:12 AM ]

It's interesting that no-one has mentioned libflashsupport yet.

The pulseaudio bug #264 only happens via the libflashsupport API. There are however also issues with using the pulseaudio alsa plugin to redirect the standard flashplugin alsa output to a PA server. The most concise summary of the problems come from Lennart Pottering (PA developer) from the PA mailing list:

Using ALSA as backend for Flash:

The current version of Flash relies on snd_async_add_pcm_handler() to
be available in ALSA in all cases. This is ugly (especially from a
plugin, since it relies on unix signals), and broken (since they don't
properly handle the signal handler context) and cannot be properly
supported in the PA backend for libasound (unless we'd resort to some
exceptionally ugly hacks, which would have no chances to get
upstream to alsa-plugins).

Using libflashsupport as backend for Flash:

There's a race condition in the way Flash tears down libflashsupport
backends. It's something that cannot be worked around from our
implementation of libflashsupport. See the explanation down on
http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/267 for more information.

So I guess this could be considered as two separate bugs. I didn't find any bugs in here that mention libflashsupport. so I don't thing there are duplicates yet.

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Tit Couille - [06/08/08 04:29 AM ]

The crashes still occur with Flash 10 beta (10.0 b218). I do hope someone is working on this issue. It would be insane to leave this issue unresolved in the final version.

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Luka - [07/10/08 02:52 PM ]

This are two critical bugs, where one has been around since flash 9.something and another one that has to do with pulseaudio. While the second should be quite easly fixable (or most likely it's already fixed) the first one never gets resolved. I hope that developers fix this one - good luck.

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ekot - [08/19/08 01:42 PM ]

This happens in Opera as well

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Jonathan Rosen - [11/16/08 11:44 PM ]

I had this problem too (Gentoo AMD64) with 32 bit binary firefox (3.x.x) and flash 10.x.x. Downgrading to flash 9.0.151 solved the problem.

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Kai Blaschke - [01/11/09 09:52 AM ]

As there hasn't been a lot of activity on this bug in the past few months, I'd like to report that I don't have seen those crashes anymore since I upgraded to Flash Player 10.0 r12, using Firefox 3.0.x.

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Paul Vouga - [01/26/09 12:29 PM ]

I have. Using r15 on Ubuntu Ibex, Firefox consistently hangs when visiting numerous sites, including www.gmail.com. Please fix this extremely critical bug.

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David Khoury - [01/30/09 12:14 AM ]

I've experienced this problem as well.

Thinkpad R51e
Debian 5.0 (lenny, testing)
linux-image-2.6.26-1-686 (2.6.26-13)
iceweasel (3.0.5-1)
Shockwave Flash 10.0 r15

The way I solved it is to disable the tickless kernel feature. Boot Linux with "nohz=off" in the kernel boot parameters. As soon as I did this, video in the flash player started running smoothly again, and I didn't have to kill my browser after trying to play flash video.

It must be related to my hardware and the tickless feature, because there's LOTS of people that run a tickless setup, and I assume they're running flash fine.

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Kevin Cantu - [02/05/09 02:05 AM ]

I think I've seen a similar issue causing a segfault. Firefox was crashing for me today after I finished listening to an episode on http://thislife.org/ and I installed the debug version of Firefox to see if I could learn something about it.

64 bit...
Flash: 10,0,20,7
Firefox: 3.0.5 (fedora's debug package)
Kernel: 2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.x86_64

I'm attaching the output and the backtrace.

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Kevin Cantu - [02/05/09 02:09 AM ]

As I mentioned, this is from Flash 10 and Firefox 3, on Fedora 10 Linux x86_64.

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David Khoury - [02/27/09 12:19 AM ]

More to add ...

Seems like turning off the tickless function has not permanently solved things. If I use the laptop for a few hours, and then try to view a flash movie, no sound plays and the browser freezes when I close that tab.

So maybe this is related to audio somehow. Every time the audio fails to sound in a flash movie, I know the browser will freeze when that tab is closed.