After upgrade to Ubuntu 13.10, Firefox sometimes crashes the computer

Question

The previous Ubuntu was 12.04 when Firefox worked fine. The computer is an HP Pavilion DV4 laptop and now is upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10, Firefox v28.0,Canonical-1.0. Firefox may run for sometime then suddenly a message that Firefox has crashed appears or the machine simply shows a black screen of death with terminal like output mentioning things like,

"kernel panic-not syncing:Fatal exchange in interrupt",Call trace: 

with lines like "smp_apic timer__interupt+Ox34/Ox3c" and "?poll_select_copy remaining +Ox100/Ox100"

and

"Code: ( followed by multiple pairs of Hex values)" and "Shutting down cpus with NMI"

and finally,

"drm_kms_helper: panic occurred, switching back to text console. 

A system's test pronounces the Harddrive, RAM memory, CPU and video drivers are fine. To recover the situation, I have to do a coldstart using the power button. On other occasions, Firefox and the cursor just freezes without the black screen of death but a cold restart is still required. Do I need to go back to version 12.04? Should I upgrade to version 14.04? I have done a crash report as sometimes the window says, module 'Xorg' is at fault but have gotten no reply. Any help appreciated.....

Answer 1

Try to run firefox with debug mode and in major cases it will be some non-compatible plug-Ins,add-ons, extensions, etc

Here is how you install debug mode for firefox : (Type the following commands in terminal)

sudo apt-get install firefox-dbg
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0-dbg libglib2.0-0-dbg  libx11-6-dbg libpango1.0-0-dbg libc6-dbg

Now close all Firefox windows, kill all Firefox processes, and follow the commands as follows:

firefox -g 2>&1 | tee ~/firefox_error.txt

Now it shows as gdb, now follow the instructions as below :

• (gdb) handle SIG33 pass nostop noprint

• (gdb) set pagination 0

• (gdb) run

  Now the Firefox window will open and try to reproduce the crash.

Keep looking at the terminal (Split the screen and see it in parallel if you want)

Once it is done (Crashed), run the following

• (gdb) bt full
• (gdb) thread apply all backtrace full
• (gdb) info registers
• (gdb) quit

Now ~/firefox_error.txt will have the complete crash report. While debugging you will see some errors and usually of plug ins, simply disable or update them.

In my case it was a plug in called "Ghostery". This is how I resolved. Feel free to update with an error report here, so more people can help.