924195 - Firefox 24 causes kernel panic on Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[heinrich.lauert]

Attachment: Three panic reports from the same machine.

- Suffering intermittent crashes always related to switching windows in Firefox, about once per week

- Crash reports show firefox as the BSD process name

Comment 1

[Gualtiero Cannarsi]

I had this very same bug as well starting from Firefox 23, on a very stable machine (Mac mini late2009) that never ever had a KP in his (hard) working life. Random KP occurring since I installed FF23.

I tried all the usual routines: tired FF with no plug-ins and no extensions, did all the usual maintenance jobs on OSX, but nothing. KP reports still showed FF was basically panicking my video card (hardware test: OK). So I just got back to FF22, and everything was OS as had always been.

Wen FF24 came out, I reluctantly tried it, and got the same result: multiple KPs occurring again. Had to switch back to FF22 again, and everything reverted to all green.

Basically, it appears some bug has been introduced in FF23, still standing in FF24, and that may have to do with OSX 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) and maybe some particular graphic card? May Mac mini has a stock NVIDIA GeForce 9400M built in from the original factory.

I hope this ugly bug will be dealt with, since it is preventing me to go on with any future release of my browser of choice. :-(

Comment 2

[Gualtiero Cannarsi]

Update: bug is still kickin in both FF25.0 and FF25.0.1 :(

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

A BSD is always a system issue and is probably related to the graphic card driver.
Do you still have the issue ?

Comment 4

[Gualtiero Cannarsi]

Indeed I have. From what I managed to track down, is some kind of problem with my peculiar graphic card driver and the hardware acceleration feature in FF. By disabling hardware acceleration, no KP will occur. With this I managed to updated up to FF28.0, then no more due to the fact I can't stand the new FF appearance that has been introduced since FF29.

Comment 5

[heinrich.lauert]

Hi Matthias, thanks for looking into this issue. I had BSD's in later versions as well, but since have disabled hardware acceleration (which of course made the issue go away). 

If you are still investigating, I could enable it again, but since I am not too keen on my browser killing my system, please tell me if you are still actively interested. Since Apple does not provide support for this old version of OS X anymore, the bug in the gfx-driver would still be there - question is if FF is still triggering it.

Comment 6

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

It's a pretty impossible task to fix that on our site because only you can reproduce it and no developer or Mozilla QA and finding a workaround for this crash from our side would require many man hours. You do that only if a many users are affected by such an issue.

>Since Apple does not provide support for this old version of OS X anymore
That is pretty bad :-(
Apple is very slow with fixing graphic issues but you can still have some hope if you are on supported hardware.
They finally fixed a driver crash on OSX shutdown on my mac mini after 1.5years as example. that bug was great because you want to shutdown and the crash caused an OSX reboot = you can not shutdown...

anyway, i will mark this report invalid brcause the underlying bug is in the driver