Why does Firefox crash when showing Flash content ?

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT)
  • firefox and xulrunner
  • Adobe Flash Plugin

Issue

  • Firefox crashes when viewing Flash/swf content.
  • ABRT reports plugin-container was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
[abrt] xulrunner-10.0.10-1.el6_3: Process /usr/lib64/xulrunner-2/plugin-container was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV)

[abrt] firefox-24.1.0-3.el7: Process /usr/lib64/firefox/plugin-container was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
  • After the crash, the following messages are seen in /var/log/messages:
kernel: plugin-containe[12116]: segfault at 7f7d458bbcf8 ip 00000032e260b9a5 sp 00007f7d50cfc990 error 6 in libpthread-2.12.so[32e2600000+17000]
abrt[2901]: Saved core dump of pid 1450 (/usr/lib64/firefox/plugin-container) to /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-2014-01-14-17:23:46-1450 (218054656 bytes)

Resolution

Diagnostic Steps

  • From the abrt messages seen in the /var/log/messages file, and the associated abrt crash dump directory commandline output in /var/spool/abrt/, verify that the command run contains libflashplayer.*

For example:

  • If the crash is happening in xulrunner, verify that the command run looks similar to:

    /usr/lib64/xulrunner-2/plugin-container /usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so -greomni /usr/lib64/xulrunner-2/omni.ja -appomni /usr/lib64/firefox/omni.ja 14340 plugin
    
  • If crash is happening in firefox, verify that the command run contains looks similar to:

    /usr/lib64/firefox/plugin-container /usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so -greomni /usr/lib64/firefox/omni.ja -appomni /usr/lib64/firefox/browser/omni.ja -appdir /usr/lib64/firefox/browser 7173 plugin
    

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