457272 - Files the browser has open are also open in forked processes

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 147659

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Kevin B]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008091618 Firefox/3.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008091618 Firefox/3.0.2

After watching a flash video, and then closing that tab I wondered why I could not play sound in other programs.  With "lsof | grep snd", I found:

evince 15470 user  107u      CHR     116,16  10150 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p

This evince (PDF viewer) was launched by Firefox, and seems to have the file handle to the sound driver open. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Watch a flash video
2. While video is playing, download a PDF (be sure browser is set to automatically open, or use open/open with, since the problem won't occur if you save it to disk)
3. Close the page with the video
4. Check with lsof to see that while Firefox has closed the sound device, the PDF viewer has not.
Actual Results:  
PDF viewer had the sound device open.

Expected Results:  
PDF viewer should only have file handles it opens.

This bug has existed for a while.  Bug #55283 is similar, although that seems to be more about java_vm not going away properly when there is no java running.  Flash uses java, but that bug doesn't talk about spawned processes, like I am here.

I think the fix for this bug is simple: the browser should close all the handles (except maybe 0, 1, 2) before spawning these processes, or spawn them in some way in which they don't inherit these file handles.

Comment 1

[Lukasz Stelmach]

I confirm that. My xpdfs too have sound devices opened which makes restarted firefox mute.

Comment 2

[biolizard.mail]

Yeah me too. My pdf viewer is listening to my music :)