GPU responsible for Iceweasel crashing on Wheezy, Movieplayer errors?
 

Hi!
My Iceweasel keeps crashing. Movieplayer has oversaturated colors and occasionally goes black and can only be recovered by rebooting. I am wondering if anyone has any ideas about this, and whether it could make sense to install an old xserver-xorg-video-intel_2.21.15-2 from backports.

This is what Iceweasel's about:support has to say:

Graphics
Adapter Description Tungsten Graphics, Inc -- Mesa DRI Intel(R) 852GM/855GM x86/MMX/SSE2
Device ID Mesa DRI Intel(R) 852GM/855GM x86/MMX/SSE2
Driver Version 1.3 Mesa 8.0.5
GPU Accelerated Windows 0/1 Basic Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.
Vendor ID Tungsten Graphics, Inc
WebGL Renderer Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.



And the error log mentions Xorg and a hung GPU:

kernel: Chrome_ChildThr[17885]: segfault at 0 ip b359b2cc sp b12fba40 error 6 in libmozalloc.so[b359a000+2000]
Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/Xorg (xorg_backtrace+0x49)
[mi] These backtraces from mieqEnqueue may point to a culprit higher up the stack.
[mi] mieq is *NOT* the cause. It is a victim.
[mi] This may be caused my a misbehaving driver monopolizing the server's resources.
(EE) intel(0): Detected a hung GPU, disabling acceleration.
(EE) intel(0): When reporting this, please include i915_error_state from debugfs and the full dmesg.

RAM:
MemTest has completed and shown no errors multiple times of 1.25 GB RAM.



Final Note: One part of the logs I do not understand at all is what causes:

kernel: Chrome_ChildThr[17885]: segfault at 0 ip b359b2cc sp b12fba40 error 6 in libmozalloc.so[b359a000+2000]

Let's just consider one problem per thread. That way the forum search function will handle things better for folks in the future.

What is causing Iceweasel to crash?

Open your terminal and, as user;
This will shut the bugger down. Then at the next prompt;
This will open iceweasel and may right then show some errors. Run IW as normal. When it crashes you will have the output of the IW session errors in your terminal.

Shell output upon iceweasel crash
 

OK, I get the following shell output upon Iceweasel crash:


[10725] ###!!! ABORT: Aborting on channel error.: file /build/iceweasel-uuIkVA/iceweasel-31.4.0esr/ipc/glue/MessageChannel.cpp, line 1533
Segmentation fault

Did you try a full upgrade to backports or just 1 package? backports is only meant to be use to install certain packages.

RE:
 

Hi there!
I haven't done either one yet, as I am still looking for advice. I suspect more and more that the problem is my GPU, an Intel 855 which apparently has incompatibilities with modern Debian. I hold on to hope that there might be an easier way to fix that with just a driver or something.

Have you installed the firmware-linux-nonfree package

FW
 

Hi! I looked that up and it seems that the package does not contain GPU drivers :-( just Ethernet etc. Am I wrong about that?

Don't know how you look things up but "apt-cache show firmware-linux-nonfree" shows a bit more result than that;
This is actually firmware that comes with the kernel and is removed by Debian for their default kernel because they do not meet the standard for "free" as defined by the Free Software Foundation and Debian. This is why it is called non-free.

I use the free driver for my radeon video card but it works a lot better with the microcode added. On my old box I had to install it from the tty prompt to be able to boot to a gui desktop.

Magea does the same thing and unless you use the default (non live) install DVD. When I first installed it I needed the same package from their sources and figuring out how to do it with urpmi instead of apt-get or aptitude was a bugger. Since then they have compromised and put a function in their installer, used only on that DVD, that will detect if you need it or not and offer to install it.

The reason distros remove this stuff is because a lot of GNU/Linux users really object to non free content in their installs. I prefer only free content myself but my hardware disagrees. I should add, before the true purests point this out, that I did choose to put in the Radeon card I use when I could have stuck with the integrated Intel graphics on the MB.

Driver
 

[QUOTE=widget;5315201]Don't know how you look things up but "apt-cache show firmware-linux-nonfree" shows a bit more result than that;

* Intel 82559 D101M microcode (e100/d101m_ucode.bin)
* Intel 82559 D101S microcode (e100/d101s_ucode.bin)
* Intel 82551-F and 82551-10 microcode (e100/d102e_ucode.bin)


Hi again! Yeah, I saw that list but the only Intel items were 3 Ethernet drivers. I'll install it anyway now, since my last crash was 20 minutes ago, resulting in the familiar:

Feb 11 22:05:46 d kernel: [39072.488075] Chrome_ChildThr[8161]: segfault at 0 ip b36332cc sp b13fba40 error 6 in libmozalloc.so[b3632000+2000]