Open Bug 1420441 Opened 8 years ago Updated 3 years ago

Firefox Direct2d backend incompatible with Xonar Essence

Categories

(Core :: Graphics, defect, P3)

Product:
Core
Component:
Graphics
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: mailtowim, Unassigned)

Details

(Whiteboard: [gfx-noted])

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0 Build ID: 20171120142222 Steps to reproduce: Keep gfx.canvas.azure.backends and gfx.content.azure.backends to default settings direct2d1.1,skia,cairo. Actual results: Random LOUD high pitched Ringing Noise with headphone Expected results: No loud high pitched sound
Possibly workaround: set to skia, cairo; because it seems when something causes a bug overflow and writes into the memory space of the asus xonar essence driver, you get a high pitched sound. You can follow the issue on: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/xonar-essense-stx-random-loud-high-pitched-ringing-noise.494565/page-24#post-13685442 I got the idea of this fix, because I sometimes saw an error in the about:support page about direct2d 1.1. Because the issue didn't happen in chrome and you can also choose skia in firefox; I tried this fix.
Component: General → Graphics
Sorry didn't mean to post that comment. It's unclear what we can do about this, since we shouldn't be able to clobber the memory of a random audio driver? Seems like Xonar must be doing something strange to make this possible.
It just happens that I had this issue regarly with this audio driver. Only when I started protecting applications with EMET, this bug seemed to mostly go away. It happens mostly when firefox is used, but not when the settings are set to skia. So I just wanted to report this issue and a possible workaround. In the past there was definitely a bug in Firefox, but that bug got fixed (error visible in about:support). Switching to Skia seems to prevent the interference of bugs with this driver. It is not clear why. My guess is that this driver was released before Microsoft added DirectWrite to DirectX and this is why they didn't saw this issue, while they were developing their driver.
It seems when the GPU crashes, it causes an interference with the audio driver. Skia seems to handle crashes better than direct2d. I can only report what I observe (hear). The disabling of Adobe Flash on Youtube probably also improved the situation.
Currently I only see 2 solutions: 1) Blacklist direct2d 1.1 backend when a Xonar Essence STX is detected. 2) Make skia the default backend, as it seems to be more reliable. It seems the skia backend is more robust. I saw while testing today again issues with the direct2d 1.1 backend, when under heavy load. Maybe the skia backend is more robust on slower pc's with low memory.
Remarque: I am a developer, so I might be also able to investigate this further, but I don't have any experience with the mozilla codebase.
Today, the issue with the direct2d 1.1 backend was that under heavy load the scrollbar got displayed right to the middle of the screen, rather than in the right of the screen.
I have to mention that recently I only have the issue with youtube in combination with firefox. In the past I had to logout from windows, before the sound resetted. In recent Firefox versions, it seems enough to exit firefox. If firefox was using LAVfilters, then it might be also due to installing an updated LAVfilters that it improved.

Seems to be fixed since firefox 66.0.2

Probably due to fixed bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1539118

Severity: normal → S3
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