Firefox 3.6.X and Thunderbird 3.0.X crashing with Radeon graphics on FBSD 8.0-STABLE SMP/sm64 box

[Gary Jennejohn]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:32:40 +0000
"O. Hartmann" <ohartman at zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Since the introduction of Thunderbird 3.0 and Firefox 3.6 I see 
> spontanous crashes/coredumps of both thunderbird and firefox. Interingly 
> Firefox 3.5.X works well on he same platform.
> 
> The platform is a FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE/amd64 (r205536: Tue Mar 23 22:19:04 
> CET 2010), SMP box with 8GB of RAM, QuadCore Intel Q6600 on a P35-based 
> motherboard.
> 
> Thunderbird 3 crashes rarely compared to Firefox 3. The longer the 
> application thunderbird runs, the higher the likelyhood the app crashes 
> and vanishes. Sometimes this happens immediately after starting 
> thunderbird, sometimes it takes its few minutes or half an hour.
> 
> Firefox 3 is sensitive to its pull-down menus or requester showing up in 
> some situations. I can provoke a crash by clicking onto a pull-down-menu 
> in firefox 3, it immediately dumps a core.
> 

If you suspect the graphics card's driver is at fault then I would try
linux-opera or even linux-firefox and see whether it also dies when you
use a drop-down menu.

Another possibility would be to set hw.physmem to say 3G or 4G in
loader.conf and see whether that affects thunderbird/firefox.  Who
knows, there may some weird problem caused by all that memory?  That
would a fairly quick and cheap way to test this.

--
Gary Jennejohn