768236 - Firefox in VMWare Seems to Censor my Browsing Experience

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[graystranger]

Attachment: Firefox in VMWare Seems to Censor my Browsing Experience

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1
Build ID: 20120614114901

Steps to reproduce:

I tried to surf the web using Firefox 13.0.1  installed on a VMWare Virtual Machine.

I have a Dell laptop with Windows XP Version 2002 SP3 computer (32 bit) running a T26000 @2.16gh, 884 MHz, 3.25GB of Ram

I have VMWare Workstation 6.5.3 installed, and a virtual machine running on that as a host. 

The guest is Windows XP Version 2002 SP3, with 1 GB of ram designated. The guest VM has VMWare Tools version 8.4.6.16648 installed.




Actual results:

When Firefox updated to 13.0.1 within the guest virtual machine, I started seeing black boxes appear randomly over the menus, and within the web pages themselves, as though everything were being censored somehow. And sometimes, pages show up completely blank, and nothing appears until you've moused-over a page area. See the attached screenshot.
 
Firefox works just fine on the host machine, but not in the guest.


Expected results:

I have always had Mozilla Firefox installed on that virtual machine. It has always worked just fine, until just recently.  The browser should have displayed everything clearly and readably just as it always has done, with no black-boxes or missing content. Every other browser in the guest VM works just fine: Chrome, Safari, IE, and Opera. Firefox should work as well.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Try to disable the hardware acceleration in tools/options/advanced/general

The error that you describe doesn't look like a Firefox issue but rather a graphic driver issue.

Comment 2

[graystranger]

I disabled the hardware acceleration, and sure enough, the problem did go away, so thats good. Thank you.

The fact that it only happens in Firefox an no other software installed, nor any of my other web browsers, leads me to lean toward thinking that maybe its Firefox's use of hardware acceleration that is flawed, and not the graphic driver.

I never had to disable hardware acceleration on any previous versions of Firefox installed on a VM. Did they not have this enabled by default?

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

hwa is enabled by default since Firefox4 but it's possible that we blocked vmware in the past. Do you have the vmware graphic driver installed ?

>leads me to lean toward thinking that maybe its Firefox's use of hardware acceleration that is flawed
I would have the same issues on my "real" system if this would be a FF HWA problem (or we would get more reports)

Comment 4

[graystranger]

>Do you have the vmware graphic driver installed ?
When I open the device manager, under display adapters, it reads "VMware SVGA II". When I right click on it and select properties, and click on the Driver tab, the following details are shown:

Driver Provider: VMWare, Inc.
Driver Update: 4/21/2012
Driver Version: 11.6.0.35
Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publ

>I would have the same issues on my "real" system if this would be a FF HWA problem (or we would get more reports)

Well, consider this then:

When checking to see if the VMware graphic driver was installed, I tried to check the device manager, but it was blank with nothing listed. I had to enable the "Plug and Play" windows background service and on the VM and restart it. Then I could see everything in the device manager. But then, when I started Firefox and re-enabled hardware acceleration, everything worked fine! No black boxes present. So then I disabled the "Plug and Play" service again, restarted the VM, and the black boxes were back. I went back and forth like this a few times for the sake of being thorough, and got the same results each time. For the sake of being thorough, I downloaded Firefox 9 in the guest VM and installed it to a folder on the desktop. I started it up, made sure HA was enabled, closed and restared, and everything was fine. No black boxes. 

So I guess this is problem is unique in some way to version 13 on a VMware guest with Plug and Play disabled.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You can see the status of the hwa in Firefox if you open about:support (under the graphic section)

Comment 6

[graystranger]

unfortunately its difficult for me to read anything in about:support because there are black boxes covering most of the page. but i was able to figure out where to click to get that "copy to clipboard" button hit. i've pasted below: 



  Application Basics

        Name
        Firefox

        Version
        13.0.1

        User Agent
        Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1

        Profile Folder

          Show Folder

        Enabled Plugins

          about:plugins

        Build Configuration

          about:buildconfig

        Crash Reports

          about:crashes

        Memory Use

          about:memory

  Extensions

        Name

        Version

        Enabled

        ID

        Feedback
        1.1.2
        false
        [e-mail]

        Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant
        1.0
        false
        {20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}

  Important Modified Preferences

      Name

      Value

        accessibility.typeaheadfind.flashBar
        0

        browser.cache.disk.capacity
        1048576

        browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run
        false

        browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value
        563200

        browser.places.smartBookmarksVersion
        3

        browser.startup.homepage_override.buildID
        20120614114901

        browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone
        13.0.1

        extensions.lastAppVersion
        13.0.1

        network.cookie.prefsMigrated
        true

        places.database.lastMaintenance
        1340660320

        places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages
        26830

        places.history.expiration.transient_optimal_database_size
        42927718

        privacy.cpd.offlineApps
        true

        privacy.cpd.siteSettings
        true

        privacy.sanitize.migrateFx3Prefs
        true

        privacy.sanitize.timeSpan
        0

        security.warn_viewing_mixed
        false

  Graphics

  JavaScript

        Incremental GC

  Library Versions

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

An empty graphic section, that's interesting.
marking new, the graphic team should decide if we should enable the graphic acceleration if we fail to read the graphic card/driver

Comment 8

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

-1 Inflammatory bug title. Don't even know why I'm looking at a bug with a title like that.

We decided to only whitelist the big 3 GPU vendors on Windows due to many crashes, including in virtual machine GPUs. See
  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers#On_Windows

Notice that virtual machines pose the additional problem that we can't easily access underlying host driver information. So if the host has a buggy driver, we can't easily detect it. If we can't detect it, then whitelisting features such as WebGL would be crazy. Even just Layers acceleration would be a bold thing to enable without precise host driver information, given the security bugs we've seen (like drivers grabbing your desktop into textures).

Now it would be very interesting to assess a bit the quality of the vmware driver itself. So please try this: go to about:config, set these preferences:
  layers.acceleration.force-enabled=true
  webgl.force-enabled=true
Browse to this address:
  https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/conformance-suites/1.0.1/
Hit 'run tests'. When it's done, a 'display text summary' button will appear. Click, copy, attach here. In particular I'd be interested in just knowing if it completes without crashing.

We'll continue the conversation about whitelisting vmware drivers if they do well enough on webgl tests...

Comment 9

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

(In reply to graystranger from comment #2)
> I never had to disable hardware acceleration on any previous versions of
> Firefox installed on a VM. Did they not have this enabled by default?

If this regressed in a recent Firefox update, it would be very interesting to bisect it. You could use archived nightly builds to do that.

The empty Graphics section seems like an interesting bug by itself. We should investigate that, maybe in a separate bug, if steps-to-reproduce can be found that dont involve installing vmware. Note that on windows you can spoof GPU info by setting these environment variables:

MOZ_GFX_SPOOF_VENDOR_ID
MOZ_GFX_SPOOF_DEVICE_ID
MOZ_GFX_SPOOF_DRIVER_VERSION

Comment 10

[graystranger]

Attachment: bjacob tests produced blue screen crash

i took a quick screenshot of the blue screen i got in the vm when trying the tests suggested by bjacob

Comment 11

[graystranger]

(In reply to Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] from comment #8)
> -1 Inflammatory bug title. Don't even know why I'm looking at a bug with a title like that.

My apologies. I knew Mozilla wouldn't really intentionally censor my browsing experience ever. The people who develop Firefox have way too high a level of integrity to do anything malicious of that sort and I know it. I just wanted to get your attention, which it did work effectively, but I won't do it again.

> In particular I'd be interested in just knowing if it completes without crashing.

I changed the seeings in about:config as you specified ran your test with Plug and Play service disabled and Firefox HA enabled, and it did crash. I got the blue screen of death (see attached: bjacob tests produced blue screen crash)

I then re-enabled Plug and Play service and restarted the machine, left Firefox HA enabled, ran the tests, and got the same blue screen again.

So then I restarted the VM, opened Firefox, disabled HA, restarted Firefox, ran the tests, and this time the entire VM froze. I didn't get a blue screen. Everything just froze and stayed that way. So I rebooted the VM once again, and changed my about:config settings back the way they were before so I could get on with the rest of the days work.

So what does this mean? The display drivers on my VM are corrupt or out of date?

Comment 12

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

(In reply to graystranger from comment #11)
> So what does this mean? The display drivers on my VM are corrupt or out of
> date?

It means that the display drivers of your VM are buggy, and that we do the right thing by blacklisting them. If I understand correctly the earlier comments, the problem you reported only occurs with force-enabling hardware acceleration, right? So all in all, if I understand correctly what was discussed above, there is nothing to do here, these drivers should stay on the blacklist.

Comment 13

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

(In reply to Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] from comment #12)
> acceleration, right? So all in all, if I understand correctly what was
> discussed above, there is nothing to do here, these drivers should stay on
> the blacklist.

The problem is that Firefox doesn't detect the vmware driver (see about:support in comment#6) if the Plug and Play service in windows is disabled.
from comment#4
>So I guess this is problem is unique in some way to version 13 on a VMware guest 
>with Plug and Play disabled.

It seems that the hardware acceleration is _not_ disabled if the driver name/version can not be read and that is causing issues with the buggy driver.
Comment#0 suggests that this is a regression. 
Did we change from a whitelist with a blacklist ?

Comment 14

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

Hm. the about:support in comment 6 does not have a graphics section, possibly due to a JS exception in aboutSupport.js. Would be interesting to check if there's some error (open Web Console, reload about:support). Alternatively, you could generate a crash report (for example with the 'Crash Me' Firefox extension), it would contain equivalent information.

It would also be very helpful to have a tight regression window for this. I don't see what recent change could have changed that.

Comment 15

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

Also, is the "Graphics empty in about:support when Plug&Play service is disabled" issue reproducible on all Windows systems, or only in VMWare? In the former case, the bug is much more general and there is nothing VMWare specific here...

Comment 16

[Elbart]

(In reply to Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away) from comment #8)
> Now it would be very interesting to assess a bit the quality of the vmware
> driver itself. So please try this: go to about:config, set these preferences:
>   layers.acceleration.force-enabled=true
>   webgl.force-enabled=true
> Browse to this address:
>  
> https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/conformance-
> suites/1.0.1/
> Hit 'run tests'. When it's done, a 'display text summary' button will
> appear. Click, copy, attach here. In particular I'd be interested in just
> knowing if it completes without crashing.

To whom it may concern:

Firefox Nightly 2015-04-17, Windows 7, VMware:
Test Summary (45234 total tests):
Tests PASSED: 44409
Tests FAILED: 825
Tests TIMED OUT: 1
Tests SKIPPED: 0
https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8830594


Firefox Nightly 2015-04-17, Windows 7:
Test Summary (45496 total tests):
Tests PASSED: 44682
Tests FAILED: 814
Tests TIMED OUT: 1
Tests SKIPPED: 0
https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8830595

https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html 1.0.4 (beta)
  layers.acceleration.force-enabled=true
  webgl.force-enabled=true
  
  gfx.direct2d.disabled=true for the test outside the VM.

Comment 17

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

Unable to reproduce.