LWN.net Logo

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Posted Feb 28, 2012 12:27 UTC (Tue) by chrisV (subscriber, #43417)
Parent article: Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

"... and built based on an HTML5 stack with powerful Web APIs ..."

It would be nice if mozilla could get html5 working properly on their existing platforms: this bug has been outstanding since 2010: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612246 .

Bizarrely, only one user can play html5 audio or video on a computer using firefox until the /tmp directory is cleared out, and so on for the next user.


(Log in to post comments)

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Posted Feb 28, 2012 14:43 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]

If that bug is biting you and you want to work around it, take a look at pam_namespace. Polyinstantiated /tmp should make your problem go away.

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Posted Feb 28, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by chrisV (subscriber, #43417) [Link]

> Polyinstantiated /tmp should make your problem go away.

In fact, I just patched the source code (a slightly different patch than the one in that particular bug report). Not knowing the mozilla source code, it took me nearly a day to track this bug down (not having found the earlier bug report in bugzilla), and I ended up being really surprised that such a basic error, with such a trivial fix, and with user impact, could be allowed to linger so long in the code base, particularly when I later found out that there was an active bug report from 2010.

That is as it may be. For those who don't want to patch the source, I suspect it would be easier to start firefox with a shell script which sets TMPDIR.

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Posted Feb 28, 2012 16:42 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I hope you've provided your patch to Mozilla's bug tracker.

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Posted Feb 28, 2012 18:04 UTC (Tue) by ndye (subscriber, #9947) [Link]

Bizarrely, only one user can play html5 audio or video on a computer using firefox until the /tmp directory is cleared out, and so on for the next user.

That sounds an awful lot like my experience with a JVM running the iLO remote console (RC) from an HP DL380:  The first user who starts an RC session can start an RC from another host, but no other user can start an RC until that person quits.  This Fortune 100 company can't be bothered to diagnose and fix the problem, so now the "secure gateway" boxes are Windows.

"Oh well," say the poor IT saps, "it's path of least resistance:  The folks in charge also love Exchange, Office, SharePoint, Active Directory, etc."  Golf-course-ware at its finest.

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Posted Feb 28, 2012 23:11 UTC (Tue) by chrisV (subscriber, #43417) [Link]

> The first user who starts an RC session can start an RC from another host,
> but no other user can start an RC until that person quits.

It's worse than that. Two different users can't use html5 audio/video with firefox (and presumably other mozilla products) consecutively, as well as concurrently, unless the temporary directory is cleaned out. This basically means that if you share your home computer with your spouse/partner, you are out of luck. (For distributions such as ubuntu which do clear out the /tmp directory on reboots, you can at least reboot if your significant other wants to use his/her user account, but that is hardly convenient.)

Mozilla to ship Boot to Gecko devices in 2012

Posted Feb 29, 2012 7:45 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Denial of service attack FTW! I wonder if it also allows arbitrary file overwrite.

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds