Comment 44 for bug 158126

I just built nspluginwrapper 1.1.2-0ubuntu1 completely vanilla *except* I commented out the 006_runtime-restart.diff patch, and I've found flash to be much more robust without it; I am no longer required to restart firefox when flash fails. Sometimes, I have to reload the page but that's it. I think this may solve or at least mitigate at lot of the problems people have been having with nspluginwrapper on amd64 ubuntu.

My reasoning for doing this was as follows:

I had these same "gray box" flash problems accompanied by npviewer.bin segfaults in dmesg on hardy. After them, I always had to restart firefox in order to get flash working again.

Someone on another bug pointed out that nspluginwrapper 1.1.x upstream is designed to "survive" these segfaults. I decided to download the vanilla nspluginwrapper 1.1.x from upstream and try it out. As I'd heard, I still experienced the npviewer.bin segfaults in dmesg, but I wasn't required to restart firefox in order to get flash to work after it (reloading pages did not help).

Then intrepid came out, and I saw that ubuntu had moved to nspluginwrapper 1.1.2. Excited, I tried this, only to find the same sort of behavior; flash failing and requiring a firefox restart in order to be fixed.

I watched firefox's stdout/stderr during its execution and I saw that the last message from flash I'd see before firefox required a restart was "ERROR: NPObject %p is not valid!". Curious, I checked the nspluginwrapper source to see where this was defined, and I saw that this message was introduced by 006_runtime-restart.diff.

I commented this patch in debian/patches/series and built/installed a .deb. Then I re-installed flashplugin-nonfree to force nspluginwrapper to re-wrap the plugin. Afterwards, as I began my message, my firefox flash has been behaving much better. When I see segfaults in dmesg, and flash fails to work properly on a page, I can reload and it works just fine every time.

I see that this patch was pulled in from the fedora project, where it originally was written for pre-1.x nspluginwrapper. Is this patch still valid? All I know is I've *always* had problems with nspluginwrapper's that have had this patch applied. From the name and contents of it, it appears that this patch is designed to restart the plugin viewer when it crashes. I believe nspluginwrapper provides this functionality itself now, and the patch is no longer required. Am I wrong?