F11: Firefox v3.5.2-2 causes daily system lockouts.

[Terry Barnaby]

On 09/06/2009 10:11 PM, Tony Nelson wrote:
> On 09-09-06 13:20:31, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>>
>> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090803
>> Fedora/3.5.2-2.fc11 Firefox/3.5.2
>>
>> After extensive testing with the divide&  conquer
>> method, I have discovered that FireFox is causing
>> all sorts of hissy-fits, the worst, being a complete
>> system lockout, once per day, requiring a hard-reboot.
>> This is cause during inactivity, and no, it is NOT the
>> Gnome screen-saver.  As long as FF is NOT running,
>> I used my system for 1 week, gnome screen-saver w/
>> random - not a single lockout, no problems.
>>
>> The second worse part about FF is the rendering of
>> the graphics are horrible - extra black lines vertically,
>> horizontally, both on forums with tables, and some
>> weird characters every now and then.
>
> I also see font rendering artifacts, mostly in Firefox, but in other
> apps as well.  I blame the video driver, possibly the EXA acceleration,
> though I haven't tried XAA yet (per `man radeon`).  I have an old ATI
> Radeon RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE] rev 0.  It could be that your lockups
> have the same cause.
>
I also had quite a lot of lock-ups with a system using an ATI R200 based 
graphics chip (and issues with a R300 ATI stsrem). I suspect that the
fact that you use Firefox a lot leads you to suspect Firefox although the
problem affects many other apps ...
In my case compiling and using the latest freedesktop drm/mesa/xf86-video-ati
graphics driver code from git sources fixed the issues.
Unfortunately there have been no drm/mesa/xf86-video-ati updates for
Fedora 11 yet ...