Flash plugin problem with ARGB visuals causes crash

Created an attachment (id=2048)
Output from strace on firefox

I been having the same problems for the past 2 or 3 days. It seems to happen
after I open more than 4 tabs. Running firefox with the --sync and/or -debug
flags does not provide any more info.

I ran firefox with strace and it seems to be complaining about some fonts? I've
attached the partial out from strace, e-mail me if you need more info.

(In reply to comment #1)
> Created an attachment (id=2048) [edit]
> Output from strace on firefox
>
> I been having the same problems for the past 2 or 3 days. It seems to happen
> after I open more than 4 tabs. Running firefox with the --sync and/or -debug
> flags does not provide any more info.
>
> I ran firefox with strace and it seems to be complaining about some fonts? I've
> attached the partial out from strace, e-mail me if you need more info.
>
I tracked the problem down to the flash plugin.

I removed all extensions and themes, and all plugins. With no plugins the
browser was stable. Then I added plugins back one by one, and the browser
started crashing on the Flash plugin (libflashplayer.so).

I'll try browsing with the libflash-mozplugin for a while and see how it behaves.

*** Bug 16135 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 16243 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I had this same problem occur. In my case, it was due to the flash player
trying to play sounds and being unable to. I modified
/etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc and changed FIREFOX_DSP from "auto" to
"none". Since doing this, everything seems to work great. I did not verify if
this happened in other plugins that use sound or not.

You may add the following line in your firefox starting script (/usr/bin/firefox):

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

It solve my problems too.

(In reply to comment #5)
> I had this same problem occur. In my case, it was due to the flash player
> trying to play sounds and being unable to. I modified
> /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc and changed FIREFOX_DSP from "auto" to
> "none". Since doing this, everything seems to work great. I did not verify if
> this happened in other plugins that use sound or not.

(In reply to comment #6)

Setting FIREFOX_DSP to none did not solve the problem but
XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 did solve it.

Thanks
Mick

> You may add the following line in your firefox starting script (/usr/bin/firefox):
>
> export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
>
> It solve my problems too.
>
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > I had this same problem occur. In my case, it was due to the flash player
> > trying to play sounds and being unable to. I modified
> > /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc and changed FIREFOX_DSP from "auto" to
> > "none". Since doing this, everything seems to work great. I did not verify if
> > this happened in other plugins that use sound or not.

Created an attachment (id=2613)
Adds the XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS to the wrapper script

Attached a patch to add the XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS environment variable to the
firefox wrapper script.

Can you confirm whether this problem still exists with breezy's firefox ?
(1.0.6-1ubuntu13, or the preview snapshot version)

If so, please provide a URL and recipe to reproduce the problem.

Thanks.

(In reply to comment #9)
> Can you confirm whether this problem still exists with breezy's firefox ?
> (1.0.6-1ubuntu13, or the preview snapshot version)
>
> If so, please provide a URL and recipe to reproduce the problem.
>
> Thanks.
I do not see the problem with Breezy's Firefox. Please close this bug.

Thanks

Thank you for your reply. I'm closing the bug now.

In fact, I think this bug still exists for other people.

*** Bug 23392 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 25681 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I do see this with breezy firefox, please see the comments on
http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19565
where we show that it is an ALSA bug.

Hi

I did 'export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 ; firefox' and then loaded some flash pages.

The patch didn't work :-(

An inmediate test is trying to play any Youtube.com video.

Commenting the Composite section in x.org solved my issue.

This is going to be a big problem in edgy because the Composite extension seems to be enabled by default.

Adding "export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1" to /etc/firefox/firefoxrc should workaround the problem for now.

Having upgraded from Dapper to Edgy, I also see this. It requires Composite and 16-bit visuals. The priority of this bug must be raised; now Composite is on by default, a lot more people are going to see this.

The relevant Firefox bug is:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304370

>I did 'export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 ; firefox' and then loaded some flash pages.

Try running 'XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 firefox' instead or inserting the export into one of the files as described above. That fixed it for me :)

It seems that now Edgy's firefox 2.0rc2 (1.99+2.0rc2+dfsg-0ubuntu1) has this bug, too.
Tried running firefox even with '--sync --safe-mode' command line options but it didn't help.
Gdb didn't say anything usefull, too.

Running 'XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 firefox' is a good workaround to run without crashes.

It looks that new flashplugin-nonfree (7.0.68~ubuntu3) and firefox (1.99+2.0rc2+dfsg-0ubuntu2) didn't fix this bug either.
Even removing packages: "firefox libnss3 libnss-dev firefox-dev firefox-themes-ubuntu firefox-gnome-support libnspr4 libnspr-dev libmyspell3c2", then installing them and deleting firefox profile didn't fix that problem.

This bug sound like the same as mine, find the complete bug report attached. Firefox crashed while opening a SimpleViewer flash photo gallery in a popu window.

This still happens in Edgy RC.

Unfortunately it also seems to still happen with the new Flash 7 beta.

Sorry, that should be "new Flash *9* beta" see http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Yep it's the same for me in Edgy, same debugging output at the console. It didn't happen in Dapper so this seems to be a regression. Interestingly it only happens on the machine I've newly built with Edgy final release Live CD - the ones I've kept up to date having installed from the Edgy Beta live cd seem to cope with Flash fine.

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 fixes it as it did in Breezy.

This is the same with both the flashplugin-nonfree and the self-installed copy of Flash 9 beta as Aaron Whitehouse pointed out.

People are reporting this bug like crazy on launchpad as well as on bugzilla.mozilla.org. Something needs to be done. A lot of people are not going to have the intelligence to come and find this bug and see what the possible workaround are -- they'll just stop using Ubuntu because they can't browse the Internet.

There are two easy workarounds that've been mentioned in this bug.
 1. Make the default color depth to be 24.
 2. Set XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS to 1 in the firefox startup script.

I'm not totally sure what either one of those things does, but I think someone with that knowledge needs to evaluate them and make a patch and get it into the firefox package ASAP.

On a sidenote, is this crash mentioned anywhere in user-facing documentation? It's pretty easy to find a solution to this by searching for "firefox crash" on the forums, but I'm afraid not everyone will be able to find this.

Sigh. I suppose we'll have to do this. I think I should have the wrapper script try to detect whether flash is installed (and it has to be in the wrapper script as the user might have downloaded and installed it directly rather than using the package from multiverse). That way at least people who aren't using buggy proprietary software don't have to lose the ARGB functionality semi-at-random.

Quoting Ian Jackson <email address hidden>:

> Sigh. I suppose we'll have to do this. I think I should have the
> wrapper script try to detect whether flash is installed (and it has to
> be in the wrapper script as the user might have downloaded and installed
> it directly rather than using the package from multiverse). That way at
> least people who aren't using buggy proprietary software don't have to
> lose the ARGB functionality semi-at-random.
>
> ** Changed in: firefox (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Ian Jackson
>
> --
> Flash plugin problem with ARGB visuals causes crash
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/14911
>

I fixed my particular problem by setting the color depth to 24 bits --
why the installer chose 16 bit is beyond me -- the machine has 16 MB
video RAM and the display is 1024X768 flat panel.

* ricks1950 wrote, On 31/10/06 14:09:
> Quoting Ian Jackson <email address hidden>:
>
>
>> Sigh. I suppose we'll have to do this. I think I should have the
>> wrapper script try to detect whether flash is installed (and it has to
>> be in the wrapper script as the user might have downloaded and installed
>> it directly rather than using the package from multiverse). That way at
>> least people who aren't using buggy proprietary software don't have to
>> lose the ARGB functionality semi-at-random.
>>
>> ** Changed in: firefox (Ubuntu)
>> Assignee: (unassigned) => Ian Jackson
>>
>> --
>> Flash plugin problem with ARGB visuals causes crash
>> https://launchpad.net/bugs/14911
>>
>>
>
> I fixed my particular problem by setting the color depth to 24 bits --
> why the installer chose 16 bit is beyond me -- the machine has 16 MB
> video RAM and the display is 1024X768 flat panel.
>
This explains why I haven't had the problem (it beats me why I'm on the
bug list, I think one of my bugs was erroneously merged, I'll check into
that).

I also question why the installer chooses 16 bits.

Sam

"That way at least people who aren't using buggy proprietary software don't have to lose the ARGB functionality semi-at-random."
Nedit triggers the same bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/nedit/+bug/57808

Martin Gustafsson writes ("[Bug 14911] Re: Flash plugin problem with ARGB visuals causes crash"):
> Nedit triggers the same bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/nedit/+bug/57808

You mean nedit crashes firefox when invoked by firefox when there are
ARGB visuals ? If so, could you point me at the relevant bug report ?
You mention bug 57808 but that's just this one! And, isn't this just
a bug in nedit that should be fixed ?

Ian.

There are several graphics chipsets which don't support DRI (acceleration) in 24-bit mode. ATI Rage 128 is one of them (very common in somewhat older laptops). I need to use 16-bit cause 24-bit makes the system noticeably slower.

Conversely, what would it hurt to put export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 in the firefox start-up script? Would it change the appearance or functionality of anything in any way?

I use 3D extensions (AIXGL, Beryl), my graphic chipset board support 24-bit mode (Intel 955GMA) and the crashes continues.

Hi,
Firefox still crashes with me, even after trying all patches above,
whether it be disabling composite (which I have to do anyway since it clashes with fglrx),
or adding XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc.

Nothing works.

Sorry, forgot to mention, I'm still using Flash version 7.

I have installed flashplayer plugin 9 beta 2 from labs.adobe.com site and it looks that this bug in flashplayer has been fixed there.
Firefox works without problems now in 16bit depth and without XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS setting.
Now we need to get this packaged for ubuntu.

It's not an official solution, but Seveas's Ubuntu repositories contains Flash 9 packages for both Dapper and Edgy:
   http://seveas.imbrandon.com/

Here's another repository, especially for German users:

http://www.geole.info/Repository-fuer-Debianpakete-deb.9.0.html

Hi,
I'm still getting the crashes though, even with this new beta version.
Or is there another problem with Firefox that I'm missing?

I'm having the same problem. Ive tried every fix listed here, and Im using flashplayer 9 from adobe labs. Ive been trying to get this fixed for a few days now, because I was in the middle of working on a project when i switched to ubuntu, and now I can't load it without firefox (and mozilla, and Galeon, etc. obviously a flashplayer issue ) crashing. I have, however, narrowed down the code that the crash happens ( the only error the browser gives me is "segmentation fault" ):

basically, I'm using javascript to talk to flash and open up a socket connection to a service listening for it:

this.connect=function(url,port){
            __checkFlash(); // checks the flashplayer version
            __flash.SetVariable("__serverUrl",url);
            __flash.SetVariable("__serverPort",port);
            try {
                // boom here. - of course, nothing is alerted, no exception caught.
                 __flash.TCallLabel("_root","__connect");
            } catch(e){
                alert(e.description);
            }
            var sent = __flash.GetVariable("__sentinel");
            return sent;
        };

ANY fix for this would be so completely appreciated - currently working through remote desktop into my windows machine, and needless to say, not loving it :-)

Ive come across a temp fix, I can successfully run firefox through wine after finding this how-to - http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_flash_player - I skipped over the installing flashplayer 8.5 section and installed it through the browser prompt instead and everything seems to be working ok. This will do, I guess, until adobe provides us with a more stable flash player :-)

 I confirm this bug. I've got ubuntu edgy installed in my machine and I think IMO this is _not_ a "medium importance" bug, it's a "critical bug" instead. If you've got 2 or more firefox windows open or lots of tabs open, all of them are closed, if one of them start to load a page with flash content.

  Sorry but, firefox is useless with that bug :(

Stats:
Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 / Beryl
Firefox 2.0
Xorg set to 24bit Color (no other color depths defined in xorg.conf)
AMD 64 X2 4800+
4 GB Dual Channel RAM
107 GB Ubuntu Partiton (7.04GB used)
EVGA GeForce 7950 GT KO 512 MB GDDR3 (with nVidia's most recent _STABLE_ drivers)

I agree. Firefox is at best useless with these problems. If you're running a web-based admin app when Firefox crashes, you could even do enough damage to your system to require a complete reinstall of linux, or at least make it very difficult to fix. To make things worse, Beryl requires both ARGB_Visuals and Composite to function proberly, and with Edgy and the new nVidia drivers making Beryl much easier to install, the number of people running it is growing very rapidly, making these workarounds completely unacceptable. This needs to be fixed, and yesterday if not sooner. Another problem that seems related (at least on my system) is that Firefox sometimes slows to a crawl, grabs almost 100% of _both_ CPU core's cycles, and then freezes entirely on the next navigation (or exit) attempt, after contacting the site I'm navigating to but before starting to redraw the screen, and with no crash report generated. The only way to get Firefox back when this happens is to force-quit the active window and kill every process containing the string "firefox" in it's name with Gnome System Monitor. BTW, this is my second attempt at posting, as Firefox crashed during my first. I'm starting to feel like I'm back in M$ Windoze :(

I would simply remove all Flash support, but I use a number of sites that do not function without it, including, it seems, my bank's online banking services. I don't think very many other people would want to remove Flash, either.

Here's the crash report (WARNING: Full crash report - 16+ MB):

If flash is critical and you really need ARGB visuals for firefox, consider using the edgy-backports. The Flash beta 9 there works well.

bug 62988 and bug 14911 are dupes. Both have quite a number of other reports marked as dupes to them which is why I don't feel like rectifying the situation (Malone is severely broken here and requires lots of manual intervention)

This is getting very stupid. :-)

I've just upgraded to FF 2.0.0.1 and it's overwritten the manual patch to fix it, and started crashing again.

When is this going to get fixed? Just imagine all the people without a web browser, or people I've installed ubuntu for who now thing it's rubbish because 'the internet crashes all the time'.

What has to be done to close this bug? How can I help? :-)

SteveCoast: use the flashplugin-nonfree from backports.... this bug is really in flashplugin and fixed upstream since early November.

The flashplugin-nonfree portion is already fixed in 7.04.

The following was the case with Dapper, which also had the Firefox crash problem:

After seeing the problem, post-performance of 'apt-get dist-upgrade'... I saved all the downloads, recovered the previous day's backup and commenced, on a hunch, to manually upgrade Firefox, rather than upgrading the whole enchalada at once (as I usually do, with 'apt-get dist-upgrade'). Instead, I performed 'apt-get install firefox' after the downloads were all completed.

The result was that the 'mozilla-firefox' package was removed ...and with that, the flash plugin/Firefox bug was also removed. Subsequent 'apt-get dist-upgrade' then upgraded the remaining packages --minus mozilla-firefox, of course.

I am running stock 5.10 (breezy), with stock FF 1.5.0.9 (came on Breezy cd). I installed the flashplayer plugin 9 from labs.adobe.com site.
No upgrades to 5.10, or FF have been done, except for the flashplayer addition.
It was recommended I follow the fixes listed in http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1673725&postcount=23 , which I have done.
Color Depth was already set to "24" (Nvida GeForce4 mx 4000 (PCI) 128 mb card (using supplied drivers), running at 1280x1024/75hz resolution); and, there is no composit section listed in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, so there was no need to comment that out.
So only solution I could do was to add the extra line "export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 " in the /etc/firefox/firefoxrc file. After rebooting computer, Firefox still crashes.

Waiting on my 6.06 LTS cds (on dial up do downloading is not an option). At this point, I am lost for possible solutions at this point. Any help will be appreciated.

Howdy guys,

Can I ask if anyone is still experiencing any trouble with this bug under Flash 9 in a Support version of Ubuntu, (Dapper, Edgy or Feisty). This bug has been open for a while now and it would be amazing to show we have finally managed to close it.

I will check back in a month or so.

Thanks, Alex.

The Flash 9 packages and backports fixed it on all my systems.

I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 and I still have this bug. I tried the fixes except Flash 9 packages and backports, since I don't know how to do that.

I have a AMD64 machine. Swiftfox (installed via automatix) and epiphany don't crash on flash sites.

I take that back, epiphany crashed after a few minutes.

Hmm on Feisty Flash 9 is the default version.. Strange..

Can you please check which version of flash you are using Jolande, you can do this by typing 'about:plugins' in the address bar.

Thanks, Alex.

My screen resolution is 800x600 and I can't change it back, the screen resolution thingy gives me the option 800x600 and 640x480.

My flashplayer is version 9 rc3, from what I recall. Firefox now refuses to open altogether. Every time I select it in the menu, it says it's starting up, and opens a swiftfox window.

Jolande Poel <email address hidden> writes:

> I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 and I still have this bug. I tried the fixes
> except Flash 9 packages and backports, since I don't know how to do
> that.
>
> I have a AMD64 machine. Swiftfox (installed via automatix) and epiphany
> don't crash on flash sites.

Sorry, we don't support automatix, nor 32bit versions of Firefox and
other browsers. Flash doesn't work on amd64 at all.

--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4

Can I disable it in any way so my browser won't crash?

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 06:33:37AM -0000, Jolande Poel wrote:
> My screen resolution is 800x600 and I can't change it back, the screen
> resolution thingy gives me the option 800x600 and 640x480.
>
> My flashplayer is version 9 rc3, from what I recall. Firefox now refuses
> to open altogether. Every time I select it in the menu, it says it's
> starting up, and opens a swiftfox window.
>

Don't use flashplayer on amd64 ... if you installed from
adobe/macromedia site you probably have to manually remove flash
related files from ~/.mozilla/plugins.

Please remember not to install plugins from non-ubuntu sources in
future, as those will often make your system unstable.

 - Alexander

in progress for us as upstream bug is confirmed.

I didn't install it from another source ( think), and I know that now (first few tries with ubuntu my system crashed).

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 09:33:50AM -0000, Jolande Poel wrote:
> Can I disable it in any way so my browser won't crash?
>

You could uninstall flashplayer package. If it just happens on some
sites you could install the noflash (maybe named a bit different)
extension from addons.mozilla.org, which will allow you to enable
flash only on some pages.

 - Alexander

This still happens on my Ubuntu 7.04 running Firefox 2.0.0.3 using Shockwave Flash 9.0 r31. This can get VERY irritating. I tried all those ARGB "fixes" and color depth fixes but it still doesn't work.

Like the person above me I am also still getting these crashes. I am on Kubuntu Feisty, clean install as of a few hours ago, nothing installed manually, all from the repos.

(relevant software)
Firefox 2.0.0.3
flash 9.0.31.0.2ubuntu1
nvidia-glx 1.0.9631

(relevant hardware)
nvidia geforce 7800gt
msi p6n sli-fi motherboard - nforce 650i chipset - realtek hda audio chipset

Everything is 32bit, I can trigger this fairly reliably by going to google video, loading a video, letting it play for a few seconds then hitting the page-back button while the video is still playing. This will lock the browser around 10% of the time. It also seems to be more of a flash problem than a Firefox problem since I can get the same crashing behavior in konqueror.

I have also tried the "XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1" options without effect, and my xorg file has 24bit color as the default, and the only mode available uses 24bit. XGL/Beryl stuff has not been installed on this machine so there is nothing fancy in that regard.

my previous post is probably unrelated to this specific bug, it appears other people are experiencing the same flash crashing issues as I am but it seems unrelated to the ARGB stuff. forum post of other people with this issue is at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=340811

I've been having this problem since edgy, and still see it after upgrading to feisty (with a flash 7 plug-in that works in other OSes). Either the XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 or changing depth to 24 (which it should have been anyway, no idea why edgy set to 16) seems to fix it.

Vaio SR17, S3 Savage video card. Happened with a homebuilt firefox as well as in feisty's package.

yep the same thing here
ubuntu 7.04 and flash crashes much when on youtube.com my colordepth is by default 24

Closing bug due to no update on status from upstream or here in ~5 months Please reopen if you still have issues with this bug and can reproduce it steadily. this was fixed in flash so you should no longer see this because i think most of the issue was flash if i remember correctly.

invalid due to no progress from fix commited.

to reproduce the bug please follow the steps below:
- start firefox

- go to youtube

- search for "crysis"

- click on the video titled "Crysis Physics - 3'000 barrel explosion made with SandBox 2"

- click on video titled "Crysis - Mass Physics" at the list right

- if firefox didnt crash then go back to the first video with "backspace" or the back-button and select the video "Crysis - Mass Physics again

... now firefox should crash!

my specs: ubuntu hardy, firefox 3.0, flash-nonfree 9

Still crashing Ubuntu 9.10 AMD64 + Firefox 3.6