NVIDIA, please, fix Adobe Flash 10.2.x and 10.3.x

[artem]

Actually it's not that rosy.

When I try to replay some embedded youtube clips, I hear audio, but the picture remains static - only a full webpage refresh fixes the problem.

[DeiF]

I experience pixelation and the thing artem mentions too (sometimes only audio but no video, having to restart it to play again).

And sometimes the whole systems seems to freeze completely.
When that happens it's enough to ssh into the system and kill the flash process (in Firefox it's "plugin-container" IIRC).

But meh, what can we expect from Adobe...?

[Lamieur]

Originally Posted by DeiF

And sometimes the whole systems seems to freeze completely.
[...]
But meh, what can we expect from Adobe...?

Adobe makes a plugin for a user process. It can only use interfaces provided by the system. If a user process can freeze your system, this is a system problem and a security threat.

[DeiF]

Originally Posted by Lamieur

Adobe makes a plugin for a user process. It can only use interfaces provided by the system. If a user process can freeze your system, this is a system problem and a security threat.

That's why I wrote "seems", because it's not a real system freeze. The system recovers by simply killing the process.


Edit: I noticed however, that in order to be able to play videos normally again I have to restart the comp (I haven't tried to unload the driver or restart X tho).
When the "hang" happens, the CPU is divided 50% Xorg, 50% the flash process.
I suspect flash uses VDPAU in a wrong way and leaves it in a bad state. When other apps try to use VDPAU again they can't for this reason.

[lexa2]

Adobe Flash Player 11.0.1.129 (a.k.a. 11.0 RC1 from 06/09/2011) 32bit, FireFox 6.0.2 32bit (official linux binary from Mozilla.com), GTS-250 GPU with 1024MB VRAM, nVIDIA driver v.280.13.

Having the following in the mms.cfg (using number and not verbose boolean values is recommended in the official Adobe's Flash Player administrators guide):

EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1
OverrideGPUValidation = 1

With such setup and having "Enable GPU acceleration" checkbox checked in the "Settings..." menu (one may access it by right-clicking on flash applet and selecting "Settings..." menu entry - it might be named slightly different as I have to translate it to English from the system's default locale) there's a number of issues I list below:

* Looks like Adobe had decided to disable OpenGL and/or presentation part of VDPAU with 11.x flash player series. As a result the "best" I can get when playing videos on youtube is "Software video rendering, Accelerated video decoding" and jerky performance when playing fullscreen 1080p. Performance was way better with version 10.3 of flash player and I would call how it was "almost ideal" unless that annoying "overlay" problems that are all well-know to the thread posters.

* "Molehil" acceleration doesn't work as expected. Using testcase at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/f.../molehill.html I get about 150% CPU usage while it should be around 3-5% in case "Molehil" were working correctly using OpenGL to accelearate animation. "Zombies" techdemo is also extremely slow and CPU hungry. Unfortunately I had missed times when flash player incubation 11.0 d0 version had been offered for downloads from Adobe Labs so I can't test "Molehil" techdemos with it. There were reports on forums that acceleration had been working as expected with that version of flash player.

* Enabling VDPAU for flash player results in periodical "freezes" of the entire X server followed by quick black "flash" across the entire screen and lines like following written to the kernel log (dmesg):

[765362.445808] NVRM: Xid (0000:02:00): 13, 0001 00000000 00005097 000015e0 00000000 00000080
[767129.336102] NVRM: Xid (0000:02:00): 8, Channel 00000003
[767131.336076] NVRM: os_schedule: Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context
[767141.345079] NVRM: Xid (0000:02:00): 13, 0001 00000000 00005097 000015e0 00000000 00000080
[767275.622086] NVRM: Xid (0000:02:00): 8, Channel 00000003
[767277.622055] NVRM: os_schedule: Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context
[767287.632145] NVRM: Xid (0000:02:00): 13, 0001 00000000 00005097 000015e0 00000000 00000080

It seems to me that flash player does something strange with how it interacts with libvdpau leading to HW hang followed by automatic HW recovery after the expiry of GPU hang watchdog timer. Disabling usage of vdpau by flash player either by editing mms.cfg or by unchecking "Enable GPU acceleration" checkbox workarounds this problem.

To summarize the above: with 11.0 RC1 using flash player with VDPAU had become more stable than it was in prior versions but this stability was achieved not by really fixing the bugs but rather by disabling output acceleration through GLX thus skipping renderpaths that triggered the bugs. While I beleive that most of the crappy code is inside flash player there are obviously things to fix on nVIDIA side either. The fact that userland app is able to bring the system - X server part of it - into totally unusable state (and - under some circumstances - it even may lead to a hard hang at kernel level and/or kernel panic) by messing with HW through VDPAU interface isn't acceptable. Userland interfaces providing access to the HW features must be foolproof, it would be a huge security risk otherwise.

[Fackamato]

Here's another bug report, this time on Nvidia Ion + Atom. (attached)

X sometimes freezes with 100% CPU usage when playing youtube flash in firefox.

[Lamieur]

As lexa2 observed in RC1, final release of Flash 11.0.1.152 also disables hardware acceleration even if it's turned on in the settings. Guess that's better than leaking through black.

I'm not trying VDPAU since you've confirmed it breaks the system just as with Flash 10. I'm a Linux user, gotta cherish my precious uptime! ;)

[rockob]

It's not just a problem with vdpau, though. The "Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context" error causing X to slow (and usually lock the kernel up completely) has been around for ages (and is still in the 290.03 driver). I get it in 3d apps like wine games.

[kokoko3k]

Originally Posted by lexa2

[..]
* Looks like Adobe had decided to disable OpenGL and/or presentation part of VDPAU with 11.x flash player series. As a result the "best" I can get when playing videos on youtube is "Software video rendering, Accelerated video decoding" and jerky performance when playing fullscreen 1080p.[..]

With this regard, i opened a bug report to adobe here:
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?...bug&id=3002806
If you guys care about flash performance, please, vote for the bug.

[lexa2]

Originally Posted by kokoko3k

With this regard, i opened a bug report to adobe here:
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?...bug&id=3002806
If you guys care about flash performance, please, vote for the bug.

Oh, been there some time ago. We do care. Adobe is not. My bugreports about Flash failing to properly detect and work on X11/Linux with dual-monitor setup and Xinerama extension were simply ignored and - after some period of time - silently deleted. Hope this one you had reported would be of a more success.

[one_and_only]

Well, strange thing, there is new beta: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer11-2.html with this one I have both accelerated decoding and rendering, but, also pretty high CPU usage ;/ - about 40% on one core (and about 2x50% while the video is buffering - is this an issue on windows?) Just like they said in the note, they can now use both (for me) cores, but not very well:

Unknown sequence number while processing queue
[xcb] Most likely this is a multi-threaded client and XInitThreads has not been called
[xcb] Aborting, sorry about that.
chromium-browser/chrome --type=plugin --plugin-path=/opt/Adobe/flash-player/plugin/libflashplayer.so --lang=pl --channel=14312.0x7f1c2727bd80.1807095856: /var/tmp/portage/x11-libs/libX11-1.4.4/work/libX11-1.4.4/src/xcb_io.c:273: poll_for_event: Assertion `!xcb_xlib_threads_sequence_lost' failed.

And overlay bug still exists.

[lexa2]

Originally Posted by one_and_only

...(and about 2x50% while the video is buffering - is this an issue on windows?)

On Windows high CPU usage while buffering is ab old and well known issue that's been there for years. It's almost impossible to watch 720p flash videos without dropped frames on APU C-50 systems while the flash player buffering the video from YouTube. As soon as buffering ends - video displays smoothly without noticeable frame dropping.

Originally Posted by one_and_only

And overlay bug still exists.

Actually I'm so bored with Flash Player issues under Linux that even don't want to spend my time checking new beta just to run into a bunch of old and new bugs. For now I resort to watching flash videos under Google Chrome on my linux workstation as it is the only semi-bug-free way to do it. Same flashplayer binary under Firefox 7.0.1 works slowly as hell and almost hangs Firefox each time I try to open up more than three pages with embedded flash content. God bless HTML5, I wish this cross-platform technology a great success and would be happy to see Adobe Flash to be burned in flames.