Solved Random system crashes while using Firefox

bsduck

bsduck

Hello,

Since a few weeks, I experience regular crashes of the system while browsing the web with Firefox. I couldn't find a pattern of when this occurs, it seems random to me, the only constant is that it happens together with an action from me (clicking on a link or button, hovering over an element, etc.). Suddenly the display will freeze and the system become irresponsive (I can't switch to another TTY, nor cleanly power off the machine by pressing the power button). It usually happens between 0 and 3 times a day.

The problem occurs on two computers, both of which are equipped with Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs with integrated graphics (HD Graphics 4000). I've not (yet?) had this issue on the third desktop computer running FreeBSD I use, but this one has an nvidia card and runs Firefox ESR, making it hard to compare. The latter being my office computer at work, I'm not willing to try running latest Firefox to see if it crashes there too. I could try running Firefox ESR on the other machines, although this would be a bit unpractical given Firefox doesn't let you use profiles from newer releases on older ones.

I'm not sure whether it is a bug in Firefox, in drm-kmod or somewhere else. I've used drm-510-kmod for a long time and didn't have such issues; the problem first appeared after I had upgraded to drm-61-kmod, so at first I thought it was the culprit, but reverting to drm-510-kmod didn't fix the issue, so I think it is probably Firefox.

Before I file a bug report, does anyone experience similar issues?
 
It might come from Firefox, I have noticed a similar issue on Linux since few weeks/months. For some reason, on some website, when doing a random action like you described, the computer would start to be extremely slow until the Linux kernel OOM kill the Firefox process. I'm also on an Intel CPU with HD Graphics GPU.
 
I did in the past years several times. It always happend when browsing the Internet using Firefox. The desktop crashed and the whole system rebooted, but it wasn’t reliable to reproduce. Every time had to switch back to Linux. A few releases later the issue seemed to be gone.
 
2 things I'd check:
- how much RAM and swap (!) does the system have? Firefox eats *lots* of it and if it exhausts swap the system can go into catatonic state
- do you have hardware acceleration enabled? I've seen this being buggy/unreliable/unstable on several occasions over the years... (especially on intel integrated GPUs)
 
You never know - but if you have 2 sticks of ram in each pc - i would try to take one out or swap and see what is what. extra steps wont hurt. when my FF started to crash i started to check whats going on and end of the day it was my issues with ram ( damaged motherboard and cpu )
 
bsduck said:
I can't switch to another TTY, nor cleanly power off the machine by pressing the power button).
Click to expand...

That doesn't sound like a system crash (kernel panic).

If you don't touch the computer for, say, five minutes, then does the system automatically reboot (and save info to /var/crash)?
 
Thinking about this, I remembered there is something else I changed recently: I switched from using picom --legacy-backends to default picom with current backends. I reverted this and have not had a freeze since then (about one day). Let's see how it goes.

tanis said:
The desktop crashed and the whole system rebooted, but it wasn’t reliable to reproduce.
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Yes, I experienced this too a few years ago, fortunately that didn't last long. But this time it is different, the system doesn't reboot but freezes.

sko said:
- how much RAM and swap (!) does the system have? Firefox eats *lots* of it and if it exhausts swap the system can go into catatonic state
Click to expand...
I'll keep an eye on it but I don't think the problem comes from that. I have 16GB RAM + 8GB swap. It happened to me a few times in the past that Firefox had eaten all of it, but then it just crashed and the system staid usable.

sko said:
- do you have hardware acceleration enabled? I've seen this being buggy/unreliable/unstable on several occasions over the years... (especially on intel integrated GPUs)
Click to expand...
Yes (for WebRender, not for video playback) and I think the problem is indeed related to that.

GlitchyDot said:
You never know - but if you have 2 sticks of ram in each pc - i would try to take one out or swap and see what is what. extra steps wont hurt. when my FF started to crash i started to check whats going on and end of the day it was my issues with ram ( damaged motherboard and cpu )
Click to expand...
You never know indeed, but that is extremely unlikely given that the same problem appeared about the same time on two different machines.

Cath O'Deray said:
That doesn't sound like a system crash (kernel panic).

If you don't touch the computer for, say, five minutes, then does the system automatically reboot (and save info to /var/crash)?
Click to expand...
I'll try next time it happens. Usually I just want to go back to business quickly so I force a shutdown and reboot.
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
crashes the wayland session
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(sadly) I'd consider this is "normal" for wayland at its current state... at least I haven't seen it any other on my laptop where I try out wayland - if I need to get work done, I always start a conventional X11/xfce session...
 
bsduck said:
I could try running Firefox ESR on the other machines, although this would be a bit unpractical given Firefox doesn't let you use profiles from newer releases on older ones.
Click to expand...

When I last had both on a single computer, there was no problem. Both Firefox and Firefox ESR were designed to automatically use separate profiles.

Firefox ESR aside: if you want to use an existing Firefox profile with an inferior version, it's not recommended, but can be done. There's an override.
 
Twelve days have passed and the problem hasn't occured anymore. I haven't used the second affected computer recently, but I consider this solved, the culprit being likely picom.
 
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