207197 - Reproducible segfault when visitng certain pages; problem began after upgrading to Red Hat 9

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 180309

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Yeechang Lee]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.10 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030314
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.10 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030314

Recently upgraded to Red Hat 9 from Red Hat 7.3. Under RH7.3, I successfully ran
the stock/Ximian Mozilla 1.0.1 and Ximian Galeon 1.2.6 RPMs for months without
problems. With RH9, I discovered that visiting certain pages (see below) will
now cause a segmentation fault. The problem occurs under both Galeon and Mozilla.

At first I thought it was a plugin issue, but have eliminated that as a cause
(going so far as trying the browser out without any plugins at all). I then
tried upgrading to the Galeon 1.2.10/Mozilla 1.3 RPM combo (what I am running
now) from http://galeon.sourceforge.net/, with no change in behavior.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Visit certain pages, such as:

http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp (might have to scroll down a
little)
http://www.boston.com/globe/ (try reading one of the articles)
http://www.news.com/


Actual Results:  
Segmentation fault

Expected Results:  
Display the page normally

Comment 1

[Yeechang Lee]

Attachment: strace log of session that ends in crash (gzipped)

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Please provide a Talkback ID from a 1.3 or later build from Mozilla.org.
(Talkback isn't included in the RPM builds)

Comment 3

[Yeechang Lee]

Turns out to be a font issue (!), as proven by the lack of crashes when visiting
the example pages with 'Use own fonts' turned on. By contrast, I can cause a
crash by bringing up the font chooser and picking Courier (elot), which was part
of a  'fonts-ISO8859-2-1.0-11' RPM, a set of Greek fonts, that was installed on
my system in July 2002 (so not part of Red Hat 9). Not sure why it's causing an
issue now; presumably some incompatibility with this font (and/or others in the
family) and Red Hat 9's new font backend?

Comment 4

[Andrew Schultz]

worksforme with linux CVS/gtk2/xft
do you have any .fon fonts?  see bug 180309

please grab a stack trace:
% mozilla --sync &
% ps u -C mozilla-bin
% gdb /usr/lib/mozilla-1.3/mozilla-bin _pid_of_mozilla
(gdb) b abort
(gdb) b exit
(gdb) cont
[make Mozilla crash]
(gdb) bt
[attach the resulting stacktrace here]

Comment 5

[Yeechang Lee]

Attachment: Backtrace from Mozilla 1.2.1 segmentation fault

Comment 6

[Yeechang Lee]

Backtrace attached (see above); note that I meanwhile reverted to Mozilla 1.2.1
and Galeon 1.2.7. I did look at <a
href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=180309">180309</a>; thanks for
the heads up. While I think it's related and quite possibly a duplicate, here is
a weird wrinkle:

On my system, mozilla and galeon's font choices are different. Mozilla shows the
same fonts as gedit and other GTK apps. Galeon does not, and among the missing
are the fonts in /dos/winnt/fonts, which is a pity since I really like Verdana
in a browser. Again, those fonts (including MS Sans Serif) <strong>do</strong>
show up as choices in Mozilla regardless of OS, and <strong>did</strong> show up
with the Galeon 1.2.6 RPM build I had with Red Hat 7.3, but don't with Galeon
1.2.7 (or 1.2.10) under Red Hat 9. But the preceding is just a sideshow, because
as I've said <em>the same crash occurs with both Galeon and Mozilla</em>! (No, I
don't understand it either.)

Comment 7

[Yeechang Lee]

I've found another URL that crashes both Mozilla and Galeon, and this time only
using my own fonts doesn't help:

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/july2000/nf00713b.htm

Not sure if it's actually a result of the same bug, but the symptoms are sure
similar.

Comment 8

[Andrew Schultz]

your stacktrace is consistent with bug 180309.  can you try removing the .fon
fonts and see if the crash goes away?

Comment 9

[Yeechang Lee]

Sadly, no change. Moved all .fon files in /dos/winnt/fonts and
/dos/winnt/system32/dllcache to new 'fon' subdirectories, then logged out and
restarted X. Same results as before.

Comment 10

[Yeechang Lee]

Misspoke; turns out fontconfig automatically pulls in fonts from all
subdirectories. Moving the .fon files entirely from /dos/winnt/fonts does indeed
cure the segfaults with the three sites listed in the initial description,
though (as expected) there's no change with the site in comment #7.

Comment 11

[Andrew Schultz]

resolving as a dupe of the .fon crash bug

if comment 7 is still a problem, please file a new bug

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 180309 ***