On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 04:58:18AM +0000, Howard Eisenberger wrote:
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.