[Nouveau] launching Firefox causes system crash

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Grant <emailgrant at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Launching firefox is causing a system crash with a black or white
>>>> screen and diagonal lines across it.  I've tried the latest nouveau
>>>> from git and the latest kernel.  I can't find anything in the logs
>>>> unfortunately.  Any ideas?
>>>>
>>>> 00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C61 [GeForce
>>>> 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
>>>>     Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 7309
>>>>     Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 40
>>>>     Memory at de000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
>>>>     Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
>>>>     Memory at dd000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
>>>>     Expansion ROM at dfd40000 [disabled] [size=128K]
>>>>     Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2
>>>>     Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
>>>>     Kernel driver in use: nouveau
>>>
>>> Someone just opened a bug about NV4E. You have NV4C, but one could
>>> imagine that there would be similarities. See
>>> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73445 and feel free to
>>> add yourself to it if that matches your symptoms (esp if it's a 3.13
>>> regression). Otherwise, more information would be nice. See
>>> http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Bugs/ for the sort of information
>>> that's generally useful.
>>
>> I should also mention that rebooting allows firefox to open.  It seems
>> to crash if it is opened after the system has been running for awhile.
>>
>> I tried nouveau.config=NvMSI=0 but it didn't help.
>>
>> - Grant
>
> Can anyone help me out here?  This has been really disruptive to my
> organization.  Unchecking "Use hardware acceleration when available"
> in firefox also doesn't seem to fix it.  Anything else I could try?

Launch firefox with LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 -- that should avoid using
nouveau for any sort of 3d.

Is this a new thing, or has it always been the case? If it's new, any
idea what changed?