2.1.80 crashes netscape

Jamie Lokier (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Mon, 26 Jan 1998 01:15:27 +0000


Hi folks.

I've found that Netscape 4.03 and 4.04 crash, as soon as I click
anything or type anything into the window. They crash with a SIGSEGV.
Other X events, like simply redrawing the screen, are fine. OTOH, after
a time delay, the programs crash anyway. It looks like the crash occurs
when Netscape tries to fetch the first web page (be it a local file or
some remote thing).

Netscape 3.04 is fine, as are every other program I've used so far.

I can't `strace' the processes properly, and GDB doesn't catch them
either. I suspect they use threads with shared pids or something.
However I did attach to the process, and find the SEGV occurs during a
`select' call, shortly after opening and dup'ing various file
descriptors.

Who knows what's going on...

I don't know if this problem occurs with older 2.1.x kernels -- I don't
have tons of them lying around. I haven't found the early 2.1.7x ones
to be stable enough to try this.

I've tried libc-5.4.38 (which is what I'm using for everything else),
and libc-5.4.33 (which comes with some version of the netscape wrapper
RPM).

They work fine with 2.0.30.

-- Jamie