Firefox Freezes with Hardware Acceleration Enabled

[Marc Legendre]

Hi there,

I've noticed that Firefox sometimes freezes when using noVNC if hardware acceleration is enabled. I don't think this is a noVNC bug, but this seems worth mentioning.

I haven't been able to make further progress in diagnosing this, so I'm opening
this discussion in case others have encountered it or have insights. Otherwise,
this report will at least serve as documentation for noVNC users who might face
a similar issue :-)

I can reproduce a freeze with a somewhat simple, if contrived, setup.

(I say "contrived" because it uses glxgears, which runs at full speed with
mesa, at something like 10K FPS.)

Any insights would be appreciated!

System Information

• I use TurboVNC as a VNC server
• I use the latest version of Firefox (136.0.2 as of now)
• on Linux (Ubuntu)
• I have an NVIDIA GPU, and I use the NVIDIA drivers

Steps to Reproduce

Prerequisite

Install TurboVNC and glxgears, on Ubuntu

wget https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/releases/download/3.1.3/turbovnc_3.1.3_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./turbovnc_3.1.3_amd64.deb
sudo apt install mesa-utils

Setup

start turbovnc and glxgears

echo pancakes | /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncpasswd -f > /tmp/rfbauth
/opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver -rfbauth /tmp/rfbauth -noxstartup :10
DISPLAY=:10 glxgears


open noVNC

https://novnc.com/noVNC/vnc.html?encrypt=0&host=localhost&port=5910&path=&password=pancakes&autoconnect=1

Firefox will freeze after a couple of seconds

Cleanup

stop turbovnc

/opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver -kill :10