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The question Is it possible that Adobe Flash in Ubuntu 12.04 on Firefox could damage my GPU?

History So... there I was, using my beloved Ubuntu 12.04, Doing some PHP/Javascript/HTML development in Firefox. I was testing using the JQuery SWFObject plugin on some dynamic content....and it had been wokring fine.

Then, testing some of the logic that removes old content and refreshes, I triggered an onclick event to do this to Flash content. There were bugs in my code, causing it to try and instantiate Flash in a DIV that already had Flash content.

My PC froze. Rhythmbox was still playing, but everything else was frozen.

I rebooted, and horror. Black Screen. After much messing around, I was able to get a 640x480 display on main monitor and not detect the second. Reinstalled graphics drivers and so on... but nothing would work. So I upgraded distro to 12.10 and reinstalled the nvidia 331 drivers. Got one session out of it, and since then although Ubuntu will boot with mouse and wallpaper, I have no Unity and not even able to Ctrl-Alt-F1 terminal. Nothing.

Windows is still working, but in windows I'm now getting the (very occasional) message about my display adapter encountering a problem.

It all seems a little too coincidental to me.....? But is it possible?

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  • Probably this is not an answer, but I hope it can help. I don't install Adobe Flash at all on my Ubuntu. I use Chrome without built-in pepper flash.
    – Krypton
    Mar 17, 2014 at 7:43
  • Well, you didn't state what GPU you have other than referencing the Nvidia drivers. PCIe card? If so, the sure-fire test is to drop it in another box and see how it performs there. Have you powered off the box and let it cool off in case this is a thermal issue?
    – douggro
    Mar 17, 2014 at 8:08
  • I think it was rather flash that killed you GPU than Your brute force shutdown which may have killed it.
    – konqui
    Mar 17, 2014 at 8:09
  • GPU = Nvidia GT640, 2Gb Not a thermal issue, it's been 4 days since the problem now. I power down nightly. Interesting though - I have just found that my BIOS has been altered to try and boot from a Floppy Drive.... which I have never had! Since removing that from my BIOS, I appear to be stable again? So, maybe Flash (or the brute force shutdown using reset button) actually impacted my BIOS somehow? Any theories? Mar 18, 2014 at 0:05

2 Answers 2

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Not sure if this helps, but I had a failed GPU fan, and so my computer would hang whenever I did anything which was GPU intensive (the temperature would reach 90-100 degrees and auto poweroff). Flash can be GPU intensive, are you sure your GPU is working ok?

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  • Yeah, GPU is fine. And since I edited my BIOS to remove the Floppy Drive that I never had (as per my comment above) it's been incredibly stable. So my conclusion is that somehow, Jquery SWFObject + Flash crashed my GPU, and then either my brute-force shutdown or the crash reset my BIOS to default settings....and the lack of a FDD which BIOS was identifying as being present was causing some stability issues for Ubuntu. Mar 27, 2014 at 5:49
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I don't think so. In fact, the GPU helps to have a better video RAM memory and allows RAM to be used in other processes, instead of the integrated video processors in most of the motherboards, which spend some of RAM memory for video.

Note that if you have opened a heavy adobe flash app, if would affect the performance of CPU (strongly, if you have opened several flash apps simultaneously).

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