Firefox on fully updated L4T crashes immediately on startup

Technical Support
, , , ,
1

I’m using the Toradex Apalis TK1 module with the Ixora carrier board for testing.

I have installed L4T using the EasyInstaller. After installation I used apt-get to update all packages to latest versions.

When I run Firefox it crashes immediately after the main window is displayed in a blink. The Crash Reporter is shown shortly thereafter.

When I try to run it remotely for debugging I get the following error in the crash report:

"Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTSFP(D00-L1000-W00000000-T000) GLXtest process failed (exited with status 1): X error occurred in GLX probe, error_code=2, request_code=149, minor_code=3"

I’m not fully sure whether this error is related to the fact that I’m using a remote X session to start Firefox for debugging purposes.

I tried running glxinfo to try to figure out what went wrong, however that command was not available.

I then tried installing the mesa-utils package to get to glxinfo, but found that this package is not available on the Apalis board.

Note: I also tried to start Firefox directly on the board in safe mode, but it crashes the same way as when not using safe mode.

I also tried starting Firefox from a debugger, which yields the following (not so helpful) backtrace:

Program received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction.
0xb465d5d2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so
(gdb) bt
#0  0xb465d5d2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so
#1  0xb4717f76 in ?? () from /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so
Backtrace stopped: previous frame identical to this frame (corrupt stack?)

Anyone has a hint or tip?

Firefox is very important for me to get running as it powers the user interface of the product.

2

hi Jens, which Bsp version are you using?

3

How can I check the version number? (I have recently installed the latest from EasyInstaller)
lsb_release tells me that I’m running 14.04.05 LTS.

4

what is name of the file you flashed using easy installer?

5

I choose L4T from the graphical menu? I could not seem to find any place to download the upgrade file myself, so I installed the graphical EasyInstaller and I selected Nividia L4T from there.

6

hi i tried to even start firefox in safemode, it is still crashing. So it seems to a mozilla or ubuntu problem.

7

So you can confirm that Firefox is not working for you either?

Is Firefox outside the scope of Toradex support then?

8

yeah, firefox is also not working for us on the newest image. do you need firefox or some other browser will also work.

9

This looks like a Firefox bug on Ubuntu. The workaround listed here did work for me. Can you live with that for now? As Ubuntu 14.04 is still supported until April 2019 I would assume for it to eventually get properly fixed.

10

Hmm, sadly the fix is not really something we can live with. I’m specifically evaluating the TK1 on speed (performance) when running our application, where the main bottleneck is Firefox and its graphics and Javascript performance. We’re rendering ever-changing maps and visualisations inside Firefox.

My understanding is that the prefs.js change here and the downgrade will effectively disable all GPU acceleration for 2D rendering at least - thus it won’t make any comparisons with other boards fair.

I think I’ll wait a bit to see if the Ubuntu guys fixes this… otherwise I’ll probably have to switch to the Yocto based distribution instead (?).

11

I found a work-around for now. It seems the bug was introduced when Skia was introduced as the 2D rendering mechanism - this is where the illegal ARM instruction occurs.

Downgrading Firefox to version 50 - just before Skia - makes it work without having to disable GPU acceleration.

Unfortunately Firefox 50 has a different performance characteristica than 58 (especially with WebAssembly) - so we cannot get a complete picture of the performance possible with the TK1, but it is much better than having to disable GPU acceleration.

12

BTW: I just checked and NVIDIA’s latest stock L4T R21.6 released October 2017 actually still ships with Firefox 32.0.3 which of course also works just fine (;-p).

ubuntu@tegra-ubuntu:~$ firefox --version
Mozilla Firefox 32.0.3
13

Well, it only works fine if you do not care about security. If the system is going to be connected to the internet, it seems reasonable to want to be able to update with the latest security updates… so it is really a problem that you cannot update Firefox with apt without breaking it.

14

yeah, as already mentioned it is a firefox issue on ubuntu. I hope they will fix it soon.