Bug 71199 – mozilla-firefox-1.0_pre segfaults with forms and old config files

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED NEEDINFO

[Description John Altstadt 2004-11-14 13:00:40 UTC]

Firefox 1.0_pre segfaults repeatedly when working with forms, generating the error message:
/usr/bin/firefox: line 388: 14459 Segmentation fault      $mozbin "$@"
in the terminal.

Cut 'n pasted everything below from bug #62949.

---

------- Additional Comment #1 From John Altstadt 2004-09-24 10:57 PST -------

Using mozilla-firefox-1.0_pre I have been able to reproduce this without too many problems just by creating new bug reports in gentoo bugzilla.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Start to create a new bug report here.
2) Fill in some of the text boxes (don't know if this is required).
3) Cause firefox window redraws by switching desktops or sometimes by lowering and raising the firefox window so that there is substantial overlap. Sometimes just clicking in different text boxes will trigger it.
4) Firefox segfaults.

It seems reproducable enough so that it has sometimes taken me 7 or 8 tries to create bug reports if I had to do a lot of cut n paste from other windows.


------- Additional Comment #2 From John Altstadt 2004-09-26 19:49 PST -------

Out of curiosity, what extensions do you have loaded? I just uninstalled:

Adblock
Allow Right-Click
BugMeNot
CookieCuller
Copy Plain Text
DictionarySearch
Download Manager Tweak
googlebar
Image Zoom
Tabbrowser Extensions
User Agent Switcher
WeatherFox
Web Developer

And on the advice of several comments in the firefox bugzilla database, I also removed .mozilla/firefox/default.*/chrome/chrome.rdf.

My browser is *much* more stable, although it still segfaults several times a day. I am currently doing a lot of work in a wiki while testing several CMS packages, so I am giving forms and text boxes a much higher than normal workout.

Sometimes just clicking in the address box triggers the segfault.

I suspect that the problem may lie with either text box (or editable element) code, or the code that changes the context menu as the mouse clicks in different spots in the browser. A couple of the extensions listed above modify the context menu on the fly to avoid generating huge menus.

It would be nice if this was passed up to the firefox developers as another data point for them to work with.


------- Additional Comment #3 From John Altstadt 2004-10-06 17:32 PST -------

After spending several horrible days with firefox crashing several times a day in the middle of doing something critical, such as entering a lot of text into a text box, I finally did the following:

1) Shut down firefox.
2) Renamed the .mozilla directory.
3) Started up firefox.
4) Shut down firefox again.
5) Copied the old bookmarks.html and user.js files into the new .mozilla/firefox/*/ directory.
6) Started up firefox again.

Firefox is now stable again.

Note that this was not a problem with compreg.dat, as that file had been deleted several times before.

It looks like there has been very little effort made towards handling upgrades from one pre-release to another. This I can accept, although it would be nice if there was a note to that effect somewhere obvious. Perhaps an ewarn would help.

What is more troubling is that there appears to have been very little effort made towards handling partially corrupted (or different format) configuration data files. This will rise up and bite firefox users in the larger arena.

---


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. use firefox to work on a wiki site or open a bug report on bugs.gentoo.org
2. move around between form entry fields
3. cause firefox window redraws

Actual Results:  
Firefox segfaults with:
/usr/bin/firefox: line 388: 14459 Segmentation fault      $mozbin "$@"

Expected Results:  
Not segfaulted.

sabre root # emerge info
Portage 2.0.51-r3 (default-linux/x86/2004.0, gcc-3.3.4, glibc-2.3.4.20040808-r1,
2.4.26-gentoo-r9 i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.4.26-gentoo-r9 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1700+
Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16
distcc 2.16 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [enabled]
ccache version 2.3 [enabled]
Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r5
Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r1
Binutils: sys-devel/binutils-2.14.90.0.8-r1
Headers:  sys-kernel/linux-headers-2.4.19-r1,sys-kernel/linux-headers-2.4.21-r1
Libtools: sys-devel/libtool-1.5.2-r5
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CFLAGS="-O3 -march=athlon-xp -funroll-loops -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
COMPILER=""
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config
/usr/kde/3.1/share/config /usr/kde/3.2/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/env
/usr/kde/3.3/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config
/usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config
/usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/
/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/
/usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/qmail/control"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d"
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -march=athlon-xp -funroll-loops -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache distcc distlocks maketest sandbox severe sfperms
strict userpriv"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://128.213.5.34/gentoo/ http://cudlug.cudenver.edu/gentoo/
http://gentoo.noved.org/ http://mirror.tucdemonic.org/gentoo/
http://gentoo.osuosl.org http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="3dnow X alsa apache2 apm arts avi berkdb bitmap-fonts bonobo cdr cjk crypt
cups curl dga directfb divx4linux doc dvb dvd dvdread emacs encode esd ethereal
f77 fam fastcgi fbcon flac foomaticdb fortran gb gd gdbm gif gnome gphoto2 gpm
gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile imagemagick imap imlib innodb java jpeg junit kde libg++
libwww live mad maildir mailwrapper mikmod mmx motif mozilla mpeg mysql nas
ncurses network nls odbc ofx oggvorbis opengl oss pam pda pdflib perl png python
qt quicktime quotes readline samba sasl sdl slang slp spell sse ssl svga tcltk
tcpd tetex theora tiff truetype unicode usb wmf x86 xml xml2 xmms xv xvid zeo zlib"

sabre root #

[Comment 1 Aron Griffis (RETIRED) 2004-11-14 16:51:03 UTC]

John, are you still seeing segfaults or has moving aside .mozilla and starting fresh alleviated the problem?  I'm trying to reconcile your statements:

Firefox is now stable again.
...
Firefox segfaults with:
/usr/bin/firefox: line 388: 14459 Segmentation fault      $mozbin "$@"

[Comment 2 John Altstadt 2004-11-14 18:00:06 UTC]

Sorry for not being more clear. The description was cut & pasted from another bug where I had added a few comments over time. But I got kicked out of that bug and was told to find my own. :-)

Moving aside compreg.dat and starting fresh did not fix the problem.

Uninstalling all the extensions did not fix the problem.

Moving aside .mozilla/ and starting fresh fixed the problem.

There must have been something just a little off in one of the config files that was causing the problem. The code to read the config files to set internal states probably needs to do more robust error checking.

[Comment 3 John Altstadt 2004-11-14 18:22:50 UTC]

Oh, yes, this is most likely an upstream problem.

[Comment 4 Aron Griffis (RETIRED) 2004-11-14 20:50:41 UTC]

If you still have the old config files and desire to narrow down which file caused the problem, I can try to hack around the issue using mozilla-launcher.  Otherwise there isn't much we can do in Gentoo... as you said, it's an upstream problem.

Please re-open if you determine what file what caused the problem (and can suggest a fix ;-)