Bug#855557: Bug#848895: Chromium freezes randomly

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 9:41 PM, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at debian.org> wrote:
> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
>> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=855557
>>
>> now ain't that fascinating.  optirun combined with fvwm2 is a
>> sure-fire extremely fast and 100% *guaranteed* way to repro this
>> "freezing but you can ctrl-alt-f1 then ctrl-alt-f7 and it miraculously
>> all works whoopidoo" problem.
>>
>> [..]
>
> Hi,
>
> I am not sure if primus is the problem. I don't have it installed.

 primus is an example of another application, like the many other
applications, where this underlying bug occurs for reasons as yet
unresolved.  we may therefore logically deduce that it's not a
chromium bug *per se* but is something to do with the dependencies
and/or interaction with the dependencies.

 the fact that running glxgears (or in fact *any* application -
openscad, vlc, *anything*) under optirun results pretty much
immediately (i.e. within seconds or minutes) in this bug being
reproduced is itself fascinating and also a useful setup for working
out what the hell is going on.

> In fact when I had the bug (on chromium 55.0.2883.75-6) I was using the free nouveau drivers, not the nvidia drivers.

 from scanning the various responses it seems not to matter precisely
which underlying GPU hardware is used.  you're using nvidia, or
nouveau, others have reported different GPUs: it's not the GPU
*itself* which is the problem.


> I am now using the nvidia drivers with the same chromium version, and I have not seen the bug for a few days. But if you do see it with nvidia drivers, then something else must be the actual problem.

 it's not chromium itself that is the problem.  i can run "optirun
glxgears" then move / resize the window and it freezes.  therefore we
*know* that it's going to reoccur with chromium.

> I haven't yet tried 56.0.2924.76-4 that Michael says is fixed. BTW he has closed the bug report #848895, I did not get a notification about this and I only noticed when visiting the bug report web page. If any of you can reproduce the bug with version 56.0.2924.76-4 please let us know so we can re-open the bug.

prediction with 95% confidence: you'll need to reopen the bug.  the
remaining 5%, if it *has* been "fixed" with some form of workaround,
it should be very well documented *exactly* how, so that other
software can deploy the exact same "fix".  also the xorg team can be
alerted as there might be something that they can do which stops this
(endemic) bug from affecting other applications.

remember it's *not* just chromium that's affected.


 root at fizzy:/home/lkcl# apt-get install chromium
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
chromium is already the newest version (55.0.2883.75-6).

so it's not hit debian/testing yet.  i'll wait another week until it does.

l.