The other side of the moon

A few months ago I started having trouble with my RHEL5 desktop when running Firefox 3.5. On a few websites, the entire system would crash pretty consistently. It took a long time, but I finally managed to find the problem and get a fix in there.

My solution is documented on the YDN blog. Please leave comments there.

Edit 2022-10-31: It looks like the YDN blog no longer has any posts, so I've pulled this off the Internet Archive and reposted it here:

On Ajaxian, Chris Heilmann recently wrote about a piece of JavaScript to crash Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). That's not something I worry about because I'm a geek and I've used a Linux-based operating system as my primary desktop for the last 10 years. I've kept my system up to date with all patches, never log in as root, and have a short timeout on sudo. I've believed that while a malicious website could possibly affect my browser (Firefox), it was unlikely to affect my OS. That was up until a few months ago, when I upgraded to Firefox 3.5.

I started noticing that a few websites would consistently cause my system to freeze and the bottom part of the screen would show pixmaps from all over the place. The system would stay this way for a few seconds, and then I'd be thrown off to the login screen. My error log showed that X.org had been killed by a segfault. At times the system would completely freeze and the only way to get it back was a hard reboot (yes, I tried pinging and sshing in first).

Yikes. This wasn't supposed to happen. Even worse, this meant that anyone who knew how to exploit this could cause my system to crash at will. On further investigation, it appeared that this problem showed up with sites that used jQuery or YUI, but it wasn't consistent. It also happened only with Firefox 3.5 or higher on Red Hat-based systems. Debian-based systems like Ubuntu didn't have any trouble.

I also found that we could consistently reproduce the problem with Yahoo! Search, which is where Ryan Grove and Sarah Forth-Smith came in to debug the problem. Even weirder was that my Gnome desktop would bleed through elements on the Search results page. Eventually we hit upon Bug 498500 on Red Hat's Bugzilla bug-tracking system.

I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf and added Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" to the Device Section. I restarted X and started surfing. I surfed for several weeks and used Y! Search all the time. I also used a bunch of the other sites that caused the previous problems. I used sites with jQuery and YUI.

No more screen fuzz, no more freezes, no more crashes, and no more reboots.

I haven't investigated this further, but my best guess for what would have caused this problem is CSS sprites that are partially hidden, or elements with negative left margins. The former is a common performance optimization, while the latter is common for page accessibility. Both good things, so not something you'd want to change.

In any event, if you're like me and have a Linux-based desktop, and see a similar problem, it may be worth trying the preceding solution.

Note: The bug in question has been resolved by Red Hat.