1717239 - Firefox 89.0 on Linux freezes/locks system when opening new window/tab or refreshing current, requiring power cycle (mesa/nouveau)

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Core :: Graphics: WebRender, defect, P3)

Description

[Brian]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.212 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Start Firefox 89.0.1, browse to a site. Open a link in a new window.
Running on MX Linux 19.4 version #1 SMP Debian 5.10.26-1~mx19+1 (2021-04-01)

Actual results:

The second window appears but does not render content. Mouse still moves but Linux system is otherwise unresponsive/stuck/frozen. Ctrl-Alt-F2 -- F6 will not bring up console screens.

Expected results:

Content should have appeared in new window and operating system should respond normally. Never experienced this issue until 89.0.0 was released. Issue still is present while running Firefox in safemode. Firefox 78.11.0esr-1 does not have this issue.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Gtk' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Brian]

Additional details:
Unresponsive condition seems to occur when the third Firefox window is opened on the desktop. Two can be open and work OK.
Turning off Firefox hardware acceleration corrects the issue--many Firefox windows can then be open at once with no problem.

Comment 3

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

Can you try to disable WebRender?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Firefox_problems?rd=Bug_info_Firefox#Check_WebRender
Thanks.

Comment 4

[Brian]

A previous web search did not find a suggestion of turning off hardware acceleration to resolve lockup issues. Sorry for posting a bug if this is actually expected behavior for Firefox.
After posting this potential bug, the hardware acceleration was turned off by using Settings / General / Performance / Use recommended performance settings (unchecked) / Use hardware acceleration when available (unchecked)
Firefox 89 then worked perfectly.

Per the request from Martin:
Using about:support
Compositing shows WebRender (Software)

Using about:config
gfx.webrender.all shows false
gfx.webrender.force-disabled shows false

Now running version 89.0.2 with the above values and there are no lockups.

Comment 5

[Adam Pribyl]

This happens to me too.. I think, that this happens more frequently, if I run more instances of Firefox from different user accounts on one Xorg display.

Comment 6

[Adam Pribyl]

Freezed right now:

Jul 14 20:54:59 kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GPU HANG: ecode 9:1:85dffffb, in Renderer [197701]
Jul 14 20:54:59 kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Renderer[197701] context reset due to GPU hang
Jul 14 20:54:59 kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Resetting rcs0 for preemption time out

Looks like it really has to do something with acceleration. I'll try to disable it for now in FF89. Does not need to be a firefox bug, but it definitely triggers something.

Comment 7

[Robert Mader [:rmader]]

Thanks for the report! As a general rule of thumb: if an application can break the whole system - then there is a bug in the system. I.e. what you see is most likely a driver bug (either in mesa or the kernel), potentially triggered by some shader or so.

In order to fix it, I think the following steps would be useful:

• post the content of your about:support, so we know better what hardware we are dealing with
• version 89 enabled hardware acceleration on more devices by default. It would be great to know if 88 was also affected with Webrender enabled. If the hang is triggered by some recent change, you can find out the exact patch by using mozregression. E.g. mozregression --good 88 --bad 89
• FF could blocklist affected devices, but if we know which hardware/driver/environment is affected, it would be even better if we can open issues at the respective projects - e.g. mesa.

Comment 8

[Adam Pribyl]

Hm, so disabling acceleration did not helped in my case. As desktop freezing every now and then is not something one want to live with I tried to downgrade to 88 to see if this is triggered too. No freeze for two days now... hm.

Comment 9

[Darkspirit]

(In reply to Brian from comment #0)
(In reply to Adam Pribyl from comment #5)

Please open about:support, click on "copy text to clipboard" and paste it here. Thanks!

Comment 10

[Brian]

Attachment: about:support with HW accel. disabled and FF 89 is stable (no freeze)

Comment 11

[Robert Mader [:rmader]]

Hm, I must say I'm not totally surprised - old nouveau drivers are not particularly know for their stability :)
It would be great to know if switching to a newer mesa version (maybe also newer kernel, even though that should be ok) solves the issue - Brian, would that be possible for you?

If it does help, we should consider raising the minimum required Mesa version for HW-WR, it's currently 18.2 (https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/gtk/GfxInfo.cpp#774)

Comment 12

[Brian]

Mesa has just been updated to 20.3.5. With Webrender using hardware acceleration, opening the third Firefox window (currently at 92.0) causes the system to hang. There is a chance that replacing the nouveau (NVA8) driver with a Nvidia driver might help or it might break the OS. Webrender has been set back to software.
Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-5mx-amd64 (x86_64)
Version: #1 SMP Debian 5.10.26-1~mx19+1 (2021-04-01)
C Library: GNU C Library / (Debian CLIBC 2.28-10) 2.28
Distribution: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)