Firefox, nfs and libsafe

by BenV on Sep.14, 2009, under Boring

Don’t ask me why, but as usual Firefox (3.5.3 in this case) has issues. If it weren’t for lotjuh I didn’t even try to fix them. But since she smiles at me in such a cute way sometimes, I’ll fix it for her.

The issue was on teigetje, you remember the box from the NFS story earlier today.
Starting firefox gave nothing, it was just stuck. Running a strace on it:
root@teigetje:~# strace -p 12111 Process 12111 attached - interrupt to quit futex(0x8056c60, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL *stuck*

The exact reason isn’t known to me, probably NFS related, but this works to get it going:
root@teigetje:~# vim /etc/ld.so.preload i # :wq
In other words, this comments out the /lib/libsafe.so.2 line so it wont be loaded anymore using LD_PRELOAD.
“But isn’t that unsafe?”
Pfffrt…. if you insist on firefox you’re probably opening yourself up for Adobe issues anyway. And libsafe doesn’t really make stuff “safe”, it only tries to protect your machine against buffer overflow attacks. So now it’s up to your kernel to ‘safe’ you instead.