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Re: x-www-browser for ultra5 ultra60



On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 04:58:18AM +0000, Howard Eisenberger wrote:
> On 2009-03-10, gavin duley wrote:
> 
> > Howard Eisenberger wrote:
> >> This is a general question. I have been unable to run iceweasel
> >> on my ultra5 or ultra60 since it went from 2.0 to 3.0. It crashes
> >> constantly with "Bus error".  
> >
> > I've had a similar problem with iceweasel on my Ultra 5, apparently due 
> > to a futex bug:
> >
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2007/07/msg00130.html
> >
> >> I have been using iceape (currently version 1.1.14). Now I see 
> >> that iceape has been dropped from Lenny. 
> >> 
> >> I tried midori briefly on unstable, but it also crashed.
> >> 
> >> Is anyone having more success in this regard on similar hardware?
> >
> > At the moment, I am using Epiphany. This is part of the GNOME project. 
> > It's not as sophisticated as iceweasel, but it does pretty much 
> > everything I need from a browser and works well.
> >
> > http://projects.gnome.org/epiphany/
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(browser)
> 
> Thanks for responding. I just tried Epiphany (the browser, not the
> game) briefly and it also crashed on a problem page (ebay.ca), but
> I will investigate further.

The crashes like this are usually due to unaligned memory accesses, 
which will cause a SEGFAULT/SIGBUS on sparc, but is tolerated on 
i386/amd64 platforms. I would not be surprised if that's a 
manifestation of the bug reported previously [0,1], which, as far as I 
can tell, is still not fixed upstream.

I found that the most useful thing to do is to generate a core file by 
starting the program in the shell where the core file size is set to 
unlimited using 'ulimit -c unlimited', then trigger the crash. Given 
the core file and program executable, gdb should be able to tell where 
the crash occurs (even better if you have the binary unstripped or 
have the debugging symbols for it - for example, there is an 
iceweasel-dbg package in Debian, providing debugging symbols for 
iceweasel). It is usually fairly easy to tell from the backtrace why 
the unaligned access happened, usually things like raw memory 
accesses, for example trying to read a 4-byte word from a location 
which is not aligned on a 4-byte boundary. Even if it's hard to tell 
immediately what's wrong, at least it will make a useful bug report.

[0] http://bugs.debian.org/362170
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161826

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov                                           jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                      KeyID: C99E03CC


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