Firefox crashes with 'divide by zero' error
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…
- Primary Author
- @mikormack Published 2008-03-10
- Collection
- Leopard 10.5
- Archival Footprint
- 2,942 historical reads · 6 curated field notes (from 10 dispatches) · 2008-03-10 – 2008-03-15
- Credited Voices (6)
- @mikormack (4)@Ianxxx (2)@gaz919@naquaada@roisoft@WinLinMac01
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)…
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
Author Updates & Technical Revisions
Follow-up dispatches by @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.
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.
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
Synthesized Community Field Notes
6 technical responses curated from 10 original dispatches
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.
Firefox still quits sometimes but kinda once in a blue moon, nothing else crashes so I'm assuming this is just firefox
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
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.
Toast & Imovie needs cpuids and decrypts, so use marvins utility.
same with me and I have 2.0 and 3.0 beta 4 working.
[cite] 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.
Sources & Contributor Provenance (6 credited usernames · Thread #641)
| Username | Dossier Contribution | Dispatches | Active Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| @mikormack | Primary Author | 4 | 2008-03-10 → 2008-03-15 |
| @Ianxxx | Contributor | 2 | 2008-03-10 |
| @gaz919 | Contributor | 1 | 2008-03-14 |
| @naquaada | Contributor | 1 | 2008-03-14 |
| @roisoft | Contributor | 1 | 2008-03-14 |
| @WinLinMac01 | Contributor | 1 | 2008-03-15 |