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A
Anonymous
February 22, 2016
Answered

vector smash protection is enabled.....why!?

  • February 22, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 9831 views

Really frustrated by the the message that keeps popping up - being 'vector smash protection is enabled.'

Effectively it means (on some sites at least) that any time I try to play a video/presentation or whatever, the screen stays black and nothing happens.

Eventually, flashplayer reports a crash and just to add insult, the browser may lock up and have to be killed.  Happens in Chromium, Firefox and Midori from my experience.

I've tried clearing out all caches, re-installation and so forth.....nothing.  If I could get of an older version, I would....just to be able to function.

GNU/Linux Slackware 14.1 in my case - latest gnu/linux version of flashplayer (from Adobe site),  and mainly trying to preview output on digitalsignage.com is where I've noticed it of late.

To be clear about this problem,  it did not happen until of late......and I cannot put my finger on just when or why.

Seems little info about in this one. Come on Adobe, it is your closed source code, so tell us all what it is, why it's there and how to turn it off or fix the issue ?

Thank you

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer

    Yeah, no problem.

    To be clear, the reality is that Linux represents less than < 1% of the user base, yet the work necessary to maintain it is non-trivial, and ultimately grossly disproportionate when you look at it with the "doing the most good for the most people" rubric.   That's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it's useful perspective.

    At the time when we wanted to take Flash forward with features like Hardware Acceleration (especially as processor intensive codecs like H.264 emerged, which really require hardware acceleration for optimal performance), the sheer amount of fragmentation around hardware GPU support made it prohibitively difficult to produce a good experience for the wide array of Linux users.

    One of the advantages that PPAPI had at the time, was that it abstracted these problems away.  We made a business decision that making a massive investment in NPAPI didn't really make sense.  We do have a contractual obligation to support NPAPI linux for specific customers with security patches, which is why 11.2 is still available, but for all intents and purposes, NPAPI reached it's end of life a few years ago.

    That landscape has matured significantly over the last few years, and we may ultimately decide to reconsider the current stance; however, it's too early to make promises.  At the moment, you really want PPAPI Flash Player on Linux, unless you have very specific technical requirements that necessitate the NPAPI player.


    "To be clear, the reality is that Linux represents less than < 1% of the user base, yet the work necessary to maintain it is non-trivial, and ultimately grossly disproportionate when you look at it with the "doing the most good for the most people" rubric.   That's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it's useful perspective."

    Well,  you can't help everyone I suppose..... not even the disadvantaged  > 99% !   ;-)

    I understand your points. Thank you.

    1 reply

    K
    Kratika Agarwal
    Participating Frequently
    February 22, 2016

    Hi,

    Could you please let us know steps to reproduce the issue, so that we can narrow down the issue at our end.

    Thanks

    A
    Anonymous
    February 24, 2016

    Hi, thanks for the reply.

    I'm not sure what level of information to provide.

    For example, it's simply;   start Firefox from a shell (so possible to see stdout/console messages for errors etc), enter URL in Firefox that loads flashplayer and a video stream.  In the console is an message 'vector smash protection is enabled'.  The video does not play; the screen stays black. Sometimes flashplayer will inform it has crashed and other times not.  Sometimes the browser locks up and has to be killed.  In any case, nothing else it reported in the console.

    Where I have noticed it is on a particular website called digitalsignage.com - they make heavy use of flashplayer for signage presentations, but suggest there is nothing wrong in there invocation that would cause issue.  It is not possible for you to test unless you sign up, create something and try to play it.

    I can post the html, javascript etc that loads the flashplayer and video stream from the alleged 'offending' page if that helps ?

    In the mean time, could you point me to another test URL, that will load flashplayer and play a video stream please ?

    Thank you

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    February 24, 2016

    Flash Player 12 on NPAPI Linux isn't really supported beyond adding additional security mitigations.  You're running into a newer defense against memory abuse by a would-be attacker.  It's possible that a bug in the Linux player is triggering these defenses, or that you're running into some older malformed content that are setting off the security feature.

    At this time the only current version of Flash Player for Linux that we support is the PPAPI Flash Player.  Google Chrome on Linux ships with the PPAPI Flash Player as a built-in component, and we offer a standalone PPAPI installer for Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers.

    I'd recommend moving to a current version of Flash Player, as you're missing ~5 years of engineering work at this point.  If the issue is still occurring, it's much easier for me to get an engineer assigned to a bug in a current version of Flash Player than it is to justify one-off work on a branch of the code that's so drastically removed from what we're currently maintaining.

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