Subject: bug#29736: i686: webkit not usable

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2018 15:40:55 +0100

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>>> Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> skribis:
>>>
>>>> on my i686 laptop I cannot use Webkit browsers.  Eolie displays “WebKit
>>>> web engine crashed” when it loads a tab, and Epiphany displays nothing
>>>> at all after loading a page for a while.
>>>
>>> Are both grafted and ungrafted browsers affected?
>>
>> Unfortunately, they both are affected.
>>
>> It’s not just webkit: Icecat tabs also crash *a lot*.  Also here it’s
>> both grafted and ungrafted browsers.
>
> Can you grab backtraces so we have an idea where this happens?  It could
> be something in a support library like GTK+, Freetype, and whatnot.

The tab does not crash when visiting static pages like my blog at
https://elephly.net.  It looks like it reliably crashes on sites that
use transparent elements; ctrip.com, for example, loads fine until it
begins running JavaScript to display a semi-transparent banner.

“dmesg” shows me a couple of lines that indicate that the i915_dri.so
driver segfaulted in processes like “Web Content” or “WebKitWebProcess”.
That library is provided by the “mesa” package.

I’m currently using mesa 17.2.1 on this machine.  I still have a copy of
17.1.4, so I preloaded it and started icecat: it did not crash!

I did the same to epiphany, but it complained about failing to load the
driver.

Mesa 17.2.1 has a broken i915_dri.so driver.

--
Ricardo

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https://elephly.net