Firefox crashes with 'divide by zero' error

[mikormack]

Thanks for all the hard work on the AMD front. After a bit of tweaking and troubleshooting I have gotten a somewhat stable 10.5.2 using Zephyroth's rev. 1 release.

There are only a couple major outstanding issues before I can consider my system truly stable.

- 2-3 times per day Firefox will crash unexpectedly. Going to youtube (or likely other flash heavy websites) seems to almost without a doubt crash it, thought not necessarily immediately. This is annoying and generally unpredictable, so I threw on Safari last night and left it to see if it too would crash (firefox likes to crash at random times during the night) and I woke up to terribly distorted graphics everywhere requiring a reboot... so hopefully fixing the firefox issue is easier. Check below for the crash log.

- Thunderbird constantly pops up errors about connection timeouts, servers not being IMAP4 servers, SMTP sending failing, etc. If I click through them and hit 'get mail' again, it usually works (same for sending mail), and running wireshark failed to capture where the packets were dying. I suspect this is likely related to the NIC .kext I'm using (built-in ethernet didn't work -- cable was always unplugged, even with forcedeth -- so I'm using a dlink card), but that's just a guess.

- VMware Fusion is also a bit flaky and has crashed out a few times. I tried limiting the memory to 1gb on the machine (I have 2gb on my system) yet OSX still crawls while I have my WinXP VM running. I have 4gb coming next week so I'll swap that out and see if that fixes any problems.

- System profiler is reporting only 1 physical core, yet 2 logical cores. Not a huge deal, but I figured that might help my VM issue if I can get it to boot and recognize both cores. I am not booting with any special boot options (like cpus=1), at least as far as I am aware.

I had been getting crashes in apps with a floating point exception, but I swapped out to the newest AppleSMBios.kext and those went away, yet the divide by zero error remains...

On a side note, has anyone been able to get surround sound working on the AL1986 chipset?

Here's the firefox crashing log:

Process: firefox-bin [175]
Path: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin
Identifier: org.mozilla.firefox
Version: 2.0.0.12 (2.0.0.12)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [126]

Date/Time: 2008-03-09 15:02:25.017 -0400
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.2 (9C31)
Report Version: 6

Exception Type: EXC_ARITHMETIC (SIGFPE)
Exception Codes: EXC_I386_DIV (divide by zero)
Crashed Thread: 0

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 libSystem.B.dylib 0xffff0315 __gettimeofday + 53
1 libSystem.B.dylib 0x96cb36b9 gettimeofday + 50
2 libnspr4.dylib 0x00db9a97 _PR_UNIX_GetInterval + 25
3 libxpcom_core.dylib 0x00d0e6eb nsTimerImpl::Fire() + 37
4 libxpcom_core.dylib 0x00d0ef53 handleTimerEvent(TimerEventType*) + 107
5 libxpcom_core.dylib 0x00d0b551 PL_HandleEvent + 21
6 libxpcom_core.dylib 0x00d0b80a PL_ProcessPendingEvents + 103
7 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x9374362e CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 3166
8 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x93743d18 CFRunLoopRunInMode + 88
9 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x900336a0 RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 283
10 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x900334b9 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 374
11 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x900921fe _AcquireNextEvent + 58
12 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x9009095b RunApplicationEventLoop + 207
13 org.mozilla.firefox 0x00235ccb nsAppShell::~nsAppShell() + 133
14 org.mozilla.firefox 0x002c18ea nsAppStartup::DestroyExitEvent(PLEvent*) + 148
15 org.mozilla.firefox 0x000058ae XRE_main + 5892
16 org.mozilla.firefox 0x000024b8 main + 32
17 org.mozilla.firefox 0x0000243e start + 270
18 org.mozilla.firefox 0x00002359 start + 41

...

It goes through the other threads but I'm assuming that's the problematic one.


Specs
------
Mobo: ASUS M2NPV-VM
CPU: AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+
Memory: 2x 1GB Patriot DDR2 800 SDRAM
NIC: DLink DGE-530T Gb PCI card
Boot HDD: 80gb Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 drive

[Ianxxx]

I've come to the conclusion that osx is very fussy when it comes to memory timings, I know you probably don't have much in the way of memory timings on that board but just try to slow down the latency a little and see if that gives you any results.

[mikormack]

The BIOS actually gives some fine-tuning control. I manually set all the DRAM timings as follows (doing this from memory so I may've gotten the settings off):

Memory Type: DDR2 800Mhz
Tcl: 5
Trcd: 5
Trp: 5
Tras: 6
Trc: 16
Trwt: 5
1T/2T Memory Timing: Auto

Rebooted fine, watched a Youtube video with no crash, plus Thunderbird is no longer complaining. So far so good, I guess the real test will be running it for a few days and trying things out with VMware.

Thanks for the help lanxxx.

[Ianxxx]

Firefox still quits sometimes but kinda once in a blue moon, nothing else crashes so I'm assuming this is just firefox

[mikormack]

upgraded to rev 2, and now at least both cores are detected. firefox 3 doesn't seem to crash as much, and it doesn't seem to have the divide by zero error (which some googling '__gettimeofday divide by zero' seems to have affected others, not all osx86, with no resolution) so that's good.

only problem I have now is that > 2gb memory gives me kernel panics on IOMemoryDescriptor.cpp ... seems like a common problem on some Intel/VIA boards, but I can't seem to remedy it without doing maxmem=2048. Oh well, would be nice to use the full 4 gigs I just got, but whatever.

[gaz919]

Are you running marvins utility on the main drive??

It helps alot, most osx programs are written for intel and need to be converted to amd

[naquaada]

I never used Marvins Utility and everything is working, except iMovie and Toast on 10.5.2.
Firefox 2 is running without problems on my system, a friend also has Version 3 working. We've the same mainboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium, nForce 4, Socket 939, with 4700+, 4000+ and FX-57 all SSE3.

[roisoft]

Toast & Imovie needs cpuids and decrypts, so use marvins utility.

[WinLinMac01]

same with me and I have 2.0 and 3.0 beta 4 working. :D

naquaada:I never used Marvins Utility and everything is working, except iMovie and Toast on 10.5.2.
Firefox 2 is running without problems on my system, a friend also has Version 3 working. We've the same mainboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium, nForce 4, Socket 939, with 4700+, 4000+ and FX-57 all SSE3.

[mikormack]

I ran Marvin's on rev. 1 with no real change. Dunno if it's the updated drivers, but rev. 2 seems a lot more stable (and so long as I set maxmem to 3gb) and it no longer crashes -- so I haven't run Marvin's yet.

firefox 3.0b4 runs quite well too, as does vmware fusion