-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ron Blizzard wrote: > I set up a CentOS desktop computer for my brother and his kids. When > Firefox 3.5 came out he decided to download and install it like he > would Windows (he doesn't yet understand the repository system). He's > been telling me that it works fine, even though I was skeptical due to > my experience with Firefox 3.5 on CentOS 5.3. Then today, he says, > "Oh, by the way, the CentOS computer has been rebooting itself every > now and then." What?! (This is where he is in Linux -- doesn't realize > that it's not like Windows, that it's not supposed to reboot > randomly.) "Does it do it when you're in Firefox?" "Yes." > > He's okay, though, just a matter of uninstalling his home root version > of Firefox -- I've been updating his computer with yum, so he still > has the newest *repository* release of Firefox also. > > At any rate, just to let everyone know, whatever the issue is with > Firefox 3.5 and *some* CentOS 5.3 computers (an Xorg graphics card > incompatibility issue?) -- it goes beyond the RPM package released by > Michael Harris. As for myself, I'm just going to wait for the > repository Firefox 3.5 upgrade. If you run any unprivileged userland software, which includes most software on the system including firefox, and your computer reboots, then you either have broken video drivers, a buggy kernel (possibly DRM), or if you're using 3rd party video drivers or other 3rd party kernel modules, they are likely culprits as well. Alternatively it could be system overheating (unlikely for the firefox triggered issue described), hardware incompatibility, or some other hardware issue, possibly even a bad BIOS or something. Unpriviledged userland applications like firefox do not have any rights whatsoever to execute anything that can directly crash the computer. As such, if anyone ever runs firefox or any other userland application, and their computer reboots or crashes, forget about the application that you ran that appears to have triggered something, and look in /var/log/messages and /var/log/Xorg*.log looking for clues as to what might have failed. In many cases you will not find any evidence left behind in the logs from the failures, and must resort to other forms of troubleshooting. Quite often, the culprit is the video driver, either the Xorg driver, the 3D driver, or the kernel portion (DRM, or equivalent proprietary alternative), and so that's where I'd start looking. Disable 3D acceleration in your xorg.conf, try again. Disable 2D acceleration if need be. Experiment with other video driver options (read the docs for the driver you're using), etc. Now, someone might say "yes, but firefox 3 doesn't reboot the computer, but 3.5 does, so it must be firefox". Which of course is flawed logic, because we already know unprivileged userland code such as firefox does not have permission to access anything that can directly lock up the hardware or reboot the computer. If someone is having this problem, the obvious cause is that firefox 3.5 most likely has new functionality that does not exist in firefox 3, which triggers a video driver bug that older firefox didn't trigger because it didn't try to use the video driver in that manner. I'm focusing on the video driver being the problem because that is the case 99.9% of the time, however if you try the troubleshooting I suggest above and can't narrow the problem down, you might need to try using another video driver (nouveau, radeon, radeonhd, vesa, etc.) - just to see if it makes any difference. If you use a different driver and the problem goes away, then you can most likely conclude the video driver is buggy. Another possibility is triggering an X server bug, but that's less likely. Anyway, I hope this helps narrow down the true problem for anyone experiencing this. Look for the problem, not the trigger (firefox). Hope this helps. - -- Mike A. Harris http://mharris.ca | https://twitter.com/mikeaharris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFKgQK04RNf2rTIeUARAkamAKCngXLlF+tUCVvnkBGIOO8bs13tbACdGjZE L38lKNgEMXH0Yv2dBEs0oh0= =WSEr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----