Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 172455
X eventually crashes (screen corrupted) when running firefox
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:21 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050921 Red Hat/1.0.7-1.4.1 Firefox/1.0.7 Description of problem: X crashes if I use the firefox web browser long enough when using the standard nvidia (nv) display driver shipped with RHEL4. My system has an nvidia Geforce 6200 video card. If I load the linux driver distributed by nvidia instead of the one shipped with RHEL4 (nv) then the problem goes away - using firefox does not result in X crashing. The nvidia driver contains the following documentation describing a possible X crash situation on the x86_64 architecture due to a kernel issue: -- from the nvidia linux driver documentation -- The X86-64 platform (AMD64/EM64T) and 2.6 kernels Many 2.4 and 2.6 x86_64 kernels have an accounting issue in their implementation of the change_page_attr kernel interface. Early 2.6 kernels include a check that triggers a BUG() when this situation is encountered (triggering a BUG() results in the current application being killed by the kernel; this application would be your opengl application or potentially the X Server). The accounting issue has been resolved in the 2.6.11 kernel. We have added checks to recognize that the NVIDIA kernel module is being compiled for the x86-64 platform on a kernel between 2.6.0 and 2.6.11. In this case, we will disable usage of the change_page_attr kernel interface. This will avoid the accounting issue but leaves the system in danger of cache aliasing (see entry on Cache Aliasing for more information about cache aliasing). Note that this change_page_attr accounting issue and BUG() can be triggered by other kernel subsystems that rely on this interface. If you are using a 2.6 x86_64 kernel, it is recommended that you upgrade to a 2.6.11 or later kernel. ---------- I could find no reference to this issue in bugzilla so I decided to add a bug report against RHEL4 since it seems likely that this problem was causing my X server to crash when running the stock nv driver since changing to the driver from nvidia seems to have solved the problem for the moment. The RHEL4 kernel is based on 2.6.9 - has the fix for this problem been back ported to the RHEL4 kernel from the 2.6.11+ kernel? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.9-22.0.1.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run firefox for a sufficiently long time looking at complex web sites. 2. X or screen manager eventually dies - screen corrupted - logout or cntl-alt-backspace to reset. 3. Actual Results: The screen shows alot of corruption - various artifacts - windows can still be accessed but screen is not refreshed properly if at all. Expected Results: System should have continued to display correctly. Additional info:
This problem is believed to be a general bug in the open source "nv" driver's 2D acceleration code supplied by Nvidia to the X.Org project. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=geforce-6x00 is the bug filed for this issue for Fedora Core, which may contain information useful in diagnosing your problem to determine if it is the same issue. Try using the option "XaaNoScreenToScreenCopy" in the Device section of your xorg.conf file and see if stability improves. If you still have a problem with stability, try adding the following options one at a time and testing between each addition: Option "XaaNoImageWriteRect" Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" Option "XaaNoPixmapCache" Please try these options and report back if it changes anything. Please note that these options will degrade performance of the video driver to some degree. Thanks in advance. Extra information: The problem you are experiencing with the "nv" driver shipped with the OS described in the initial comment, is an issue that is unrelated to the problem described in the documentation for the proprietary nvidia driver with regards to the kernel. The 2 drivers share no common source code, and the open source driver does not have a kernel module associated with it. The problem described in Nvidia's documentation is unique to their proprietary driver.
This report contains insufficient information to fully diagnose and conclude what the problem may be. At this time we are unable to diagnose the issue further without additional feedback from the reporter in response to the suggestions provided above in comment #4. If this problem still occurs, please file a support web ticket at Red Hat support services at http://www.redhat.com/support or by calling 1-888-RED-HAT1 depending on your support contract arrangements, and a Red Hat support representative will assist in diagnosing the problem further.