Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/17/2010 11:36 AM, nodata wrote: > On 17/11/10 10:20, drago01 wrote: >> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 10:17 AM, nodata wrote: >>> On 17/11/10 08:57, Hans de Goede wrote: >>>> Hi all, >>>> >>>> For those who do not know it yet, recent Fedora glibc updates include >>>> an optimized memcpy (which gets used on some processors) which breaks the >>>> 64 bit adobe flash plugin. >>>> >>>> The problem has been analyzed and is known, as well as a fix for it, see: >>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477 >>>> >>>> The problem still exists however. The glibc developers say that this is >>>> not a glibc bug, but a flash plugin bug. And technically they are 100% >>>> correct, and the adobe flash plugin is a buggy (no surprise there). >>>> To be specific the flash plugin is doing overlapping memcpy-s which is >>>> clearly not how memcpy is supposed to be used. But the way the flash >>>> plugin does overlapping memcpy's happens to work fine as long as one as >>>> the c library does the memcpy-s in forward direction. And the new memcpy >>>> implementation does the memcpy in backward direction. >>>> >>>> The glibc developers being technically 100% correct is not helping our >>>> end users in this case though. So we (The Fedora project) need to come up >>>> with a solution to help our end users, many of whom want to use the adobe >>>> flash plugin. >>>> >>>> This solution could be reverting the problem causing glibc change, or >>>> maybe changing it to do forward memcpy's while still using the new SSE >>>> instructions, or something more specific to the flash plugin, as long >>>> as it will automatically fix things with a yum upgrade without requiring >>>> any further user intervention. >>>> >>>> I would also like to point out that if this were to happen in Ubuntu >>>> which we sometimes look at jealously for getting more attention / users >>>> then us, the glibc change would likely be reverted immediately, as that >>>> is the right thing to do from an end user pov. >>>> >>>> I've filed a ticket for FESCo to look into this, as I believe this >>>> makes us look really bad, and the glibc maintainers do not seem to be >>>> willing to fix it without some sort of intervention: >>>> https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/501 >>>> >>>> Regards, >>>> >>>> Hans >>> Is someone talking to Adobe about this? >> Yes, see https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-5739 > Adobe benefits from Flash in Linux. So it seems sensible to: > > 1. Get Adobe to commit to a fix soon WITH A $DATE > 2. Agree to patch the change until $DATE > 3. Adobe updates Flash, we revert the patch, everyone is happy I've e-mailed a with Shu Wang at Adobe (who is the assigned contact for this issue) about a date when they can have this fixed. You've got the e-mail thread regarding this below: On 11/17/2010 10:19 AM, Shu Wang wrote: > Hi Magnus, > > Maybe months. Thanks. > > Best regards. > Shu > > > -Original Message- > From: Magnus Glantz [mailto:the-mail-address-is-not-this-...@redhat.com] > Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 5:15 PM > To: Shu Wang > Subject: Re: FP-5739 "Strange sound on mp3 flash website with Fedora 14 > x86_64" > > Hi Shu, > > That's is great to hear. Would you guess it's a matter of days, weeks or > months before this can get fixed? > If it will take a long time for you to fix this, Fedora may need to look > at some way to work around this bug. > > Best regards, > Magnus > > On 11/17/2010 10:06 AM, Shu Wang wrote: >> Hi Magnus, >> >> Thanks very much for your information. Flash Player team is investigating on >> it. It is in progress. Thanks. >> >> Best regards, >> Shu >> >> >> >> -Original Message- >> From: Magnus Glantz [mailto:the-mail-address-is-not-this-...@redhat.com] >> Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 4:47 PM >> To: Shu Wang >> Subject: FP-5739 "Strange sound on mp3 flash website with Fedora 14 x86_64" >> >> Hello Shu, >> >> I humbly wonder if you may have a time estimate on fixing FP-5739. >> It is seriously is affecting the ability to listen to sounds played in >> Flash for the users of Fedora. >> >> The issue has been traced to Adobe Flash by maintainers of glibc at Red >> Hat, Linus Torvalds and others. >> You may read more about this issue here: >> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477 >> -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Adobe fix on QA/QE: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
Hi guys, I just got an e-mail from Adobe that: 1) They have a fix 2) The fix has been send to QA/QE They say that they cannot commit to any dates, but that they are taking the issue seriously. I told them that if they want volunteers trying out their fix, we can help. Cheers, Magnus Glantz -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/17/2010 09:09 PM, Josh Boyer wrote: > On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote: >> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 08:57:20 +0100, >> Hans de Goede wrote: >>> Hi all, >>> >>> For those who do not know it yet, recent Fedora glibc updates include >>> an optimized memcpy (which gets used on some processors) which breaks the >>> 64 bit adobe flash plugin. >> I saw memcpy / memmove issues affecting squashfs-tools shortly before the >> F14 alpha. So we had some what of a heads up about the issue over three >> months ago. It is unfortunate that we didn't catch the flash issue during >> prerelease testing of F14. If this really is an important critera for >> releases, maybe we should be having QA testing that flash works. > I will be very, very, disappointed if that gets added as a criteria > for a Fedora release. It would be no different than making sure the > nvidia driver works, and we certainly shouldn't be doing that either. > > josh I can relate to that. I'm all for pure open source, but.. I really can't see why it would be a bad thing Fedora would do QA on a proprietary software that is very important for a majority of the Fedora users. If we'd have an open source flash player that almost everyone could run as a substitute, then it would be a different situation. I would say that is the case regarding Nvidia. Cheers, Magnus -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/17/2010 09:30 PM, Ugis Fedora wrote: > From: jonat...@jonmasters.org > To: devel@lists.fedoraproject.org > Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:16:20 -0500 > Subject: Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility > CC: fedora-devel-l...@redhat.com > > On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 08:57 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote: > > > This solution could be reverting the problem causing glibc change, or > > maybe changing it to do forward memcpy's while still using the new SSE > > instructions, or something more specific to the flash plugin, as long > > as it will automatically fix things with a yum upgrade without requiring > > any further user intervention. > > > > I would also like to point out that if this were to happen in Ubuntu > > which we sometimes look at jealously for getting more attention / users > > then us, the glibc change would likely be reverted immediately, as that > > is the right thing to do from an end user pov. > > > > I've filed a ticket for FESCo to look into this, as I believe this > > makes us look really bad, and the glibc maintainers do not seem to be > > willing to fix it without some sort of intervention: > > https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/501 Isn't only 64-bit preview release affected? from adobe's website... http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ >>We have made this preview available so that users can test existing content and new platforms for compatibility and stability. Because this is a preview version of Flash Player, we don’t expect it >>to be as stable as a final release version of Flash Player. Use caution when installing Flash Player "Square" on production machines. If they don't expect it to work properly why should we? Because a large part of the Fedora users, uses the flash plugin from Adobe, and if it does not work, they will go off and find a distribution where it does work. With less people using Fedora, the project becomes less successful, as less people will be contributing. For me it's natural that we should care about the end-user experience of Fedora, even if that does include us caring about application outside of the Fedora owned repositories. Cheers, Magnus -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/17/2010 09:46 PM, François Cami wrote: > On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Magnus Glantz wrote: >> On 11/17/2010 09:09 PM, Josh Boyer wrote: >>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Bruno Wolff IIIwrote: >>>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 08:57:20 +0100, >>>>Hans de Goedewrote: >>>>> For those who do not know it yet, recent Fedora glibc updates include >>>>> an optimized memcpy (which gets used on some processors) which breaks the >>>>> 64 bit adobe flash plugin. >>>> I saw memcpy / memmove issues affecting squashfs-tools shortly before the >>>> F14 alpha. So we had some what of a heads up about the issue over three >>>> months ago. It is unfortunate that we didn't catch the flash issue during >>>> prerelease testing of F14. If this really is an important critera for >>>> releases, maybe we should be having QA testing that flash works. >>> I will be very, very, disappointed if that gets added as a criteria >>> for a Fedora release. It would be no different than making sure the >>> nvidia driver works, and we certainly shouldn't be doing that either. >> I can relate to that. I'm all for pure open source, but.. >> >> I really can't see why it would be a bad thing Fedora would do QA on a >> proprietary software that is very important for a majority of the Fedora >> users. >> If we'd have an open source flash player that almost everyone could run >> as a substitute, then it would be a different situation. I would say >> that is the case regarding Nvidia. > IIRC broken proprietary drivers never stopped us from shipping, but I > could be wrong. > > Furthermore, no proprietary software vendor supports Fedora timely and > fixes for issues like this one take months (from their own estimate). > So by making sure proprietary software works, we could break the > "First" Foundation. > > I would also argue we would break the "Freedom" Foundation, because > proprietary software may limit what Fedora can do. > > On the other hand, proprietary software-related bugs found before the > release would probably receive some attention (and could be forwarded > to the vendor accordingly), so anyone is free to test whatever they > use and file bugs. > > I am not saying that we should refrain users from testing proprietary > software - but we should not make it part of the release criteria. > > François I'm not saying that a broken Adobe Flash would stop Fedora from shipping. But.. if we notice that it's broken, we can: 1) Notify Adobe about it, so they -can- provide a fix. If they do not know, they can't fix it.. The Adobe developers I e-mailed with did say that they took the issue seriously, they want it to work on Fedora, as I'm sure a lot people/companies would. 2) Create a work-around for the end-users (as has been done by several people in the BZ #638477-thread) There's nothing bad about that is it? -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/17/2010 10:02 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote: > On 11/17/2010 08:58 PM, Magnus Glantz wrote: >> But.. if we notice that it's broken, we can: >> 1) Notify Adobe about it, so they -can- provide a fix. If they do not >> know, they can't fix it.. The Adobe developers I e-mailed with did say >> that they took the issue seriously, they want it to work on Fedora, as >> I'm sure a lot people/companies would. >> 2) Create a work-around for the end-users (as has been done by several >> people in the BZ #638477-thread) >> There's nothing bad about that is it? > 3. Spend that time working on open alternative and get rid of flash for > good > > JBG Absolutely. This does in a good way show the dangers of being dependent on a closed source piece of software, owned by a company that most probably won't fix something if it does not affect their business. But first things first. //M -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/17/2010 10:18 PM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote: >> 2) Create a work-around for the end-users (as has been done by several >> people in the BZ #638477-thread) > This pretty much erases whatever incentive Adobe might have to actually fix > the bug. Instead of fixing their code, now what they can do is use some hack > and not bother to update anything. It also reduces the pressure on Adobe to > release the Flash plugin under a libre license, since it would basically > amount to the community doing the work to fix the problem while the software > is still under a proprietary license. But what you describe did not happen just now. There was two separate work-arounds (one from Linus Torvalds, replacing memcpy with a custom version, using LD_PRELOAD, and one from Ray Strode, replacing the memcpy calls in the binary with memmove, using a script) but Adobe still notified me today that they are QA/QE:ing a fix. > In the grand scheme of things, this is a bug that Adobe could fix pretty > quickly, if they feel like they have a good reason to do that. Why not put > the burden on them? They release proprietary software, so they take on the > responsibility of making sure it works on the platforms they target. > > -- Ben Because Adobe is not the one that pretty quickly risks loosing users. Ignoring flash content on the web is not done as easy as you can change between two Linux distributions. As it is (I don't like it, probably no one here likes it) a majority of the Fedora users are dependent on Adobe Flash working in Fedora. If it does not work, then a lot of things they do daily, stops working. As long as there is no open source option for the majority of these users, why not QA Adobe Flash before a release? It's done easily and has great worth to the users. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/18/2010 05:23 AM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote: > Well, I am glad that Adobe is committing to fixing the problem, but it is not > something I would rely on happening in all cases. I agree completely. On 11/18/2010 05:23 AM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote: > The majority of Fedora users also need support for certain proprietary video > and audio codecs, but we stick to our guns when it comes to that. But are you referring to something as wide spread as flash? If you are thinking about mp3, then I would guess that if for example mp3 stopped working on Fedora, we would be in the same seat as today - where a lot of people are putting resources into fixing something that they care about, but what is not open source. On 11/18/2010 05:23 AM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote: >> As long as there is no open source option for the majority of these >> users, why not QA Adobe Flash before a release? It's done easily and has >> great worth to the users. > That would require us to ask people to agree to the proprietary Flash license, > which is not, in my opinion, philosophically sound. It is one thing to accept > bug reports regarding Flash and forward them to Adobe; it is another thing > entirely to start asking Fedora contributors to test it out. As I said > before, Adobe released proprietary software, so Adobe should take on the > responsibility of performing QA on the platforms they want to support. If > Adobe wants to target Fedora, then let them install rawhide and beta releases, > and make sure that the Flash plugin is still working. > > -- Ben That is a good point. I feel that this discussion is now "finding it's way home". Indeed I would never ask such a thing from anyone. But I would myself, in this specific case, not think twice before clicking on a "yes I agree" button, doing some basic testing to provide what I perceive is a necessary evil of today. The same, I guess, goes for any proprietary tech that a very large part of our user base could not imagine to live without. I'm not advocating the user of Adobe Flash or any other proprietary tech. I think it should be avoided if practically possible, but not to all and any costs. Linus Torvalds asks some questions in the BZ #638477-thread, to try and get people to reconsider that it is "Adobe's problem": 1) QUOTE "There is no advantage to being just difficult and saying "that app does something that it shouldn't do, so who cares?". That's not going to help the _user_, is it? And what was the point of making a distro again? Was it to teach everybody a lesson, or was it to give the user a nice experience?" END QUOTE 2) QUOTE "And in the end, the big question is simple: Are you seriously going to do a Fedora-14 release with a known non-working flash player?" END QUOTE For me, the answers to these questions is simple. 1) There is no point of just being difficult. The point of making a distro is giving the users a nice experience. The very majority of that experience is open source, there are a few exceptions, but people are working on that, in the mean time, let's try and make stuff work. 2) No.. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/18/2010 12:04 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: > Magnus Glantz wrote: >> 2) >> QUOTE >> "And in the end, the big question is simple: >> Are you seriously going to do a Fedora-14 release with a known >> non-working flash player?" >> END QUOTE >> >> For me, the answers to these questions is simple. > [snip 1)] >> 2) No.. > Newsflash: We already did. > > Kevin Kofler Hahaha, very clever of you Kevin. I did not read the question as "Are you seriously going to release Fedora-14", but "Are you seriously going to offer Fedora-14". Eg. "It's Adobe's problem, we don't care if flash ever work again on Fedora". //M -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/18/2010 03:28 PM, Jakub Jelinek wrote: > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 10:14:58AM +, Andrew Haley wrote: >> On 11/17/2010 11:42 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: >> How is any of that a reason not to patch glibc? >> >> Upside of patching: happy users. >> Downside: nothing. > Downside: slower memcpy on sse4.2 machines > Downside: if we workaround the Adobe flash bug by reverting that change for > say half a year to let Adobe fix it in the months timeframe, > another possible misuses of memcpy in other proprietary closed > software > won't be detected over that period of time, so then we'll revert > it for another buggy program and so on forever > Downside: this isn't ever going to be acceptable to upstream > > If you want to workaround the bug somewhere, do it temporarily in > nspluginwrapper, > or the browser upon detecting loading of libflashplugin.so. > > Jakub So.. Upside of patching: happy users :-) Downside of patching: unhappy developers :-( It's very important that Fedora doesn't rub upstream the wrong way, but (if it should come to that, or is already happening) is it worth having people change from Fedora to other distributions? There are at least two known workarounds out there, but you need to be somewhat technical to 1) find them 2) implement them. I'm sure not just technically skilled people use Fedora, which is good, but if you do not understand a specific issue you are likely not as understanding when it comes to something not working. You don't understand and just want things to work. Ubuntu was mentioned in the first post of this thread. From my perspective Fedora and Ubuntu are opposites, where Fedora always does things the right way and Ubuntu will do whatever it takes to make people happy, even if that means the worlds ugliest upstream-hostile patch. I'm sure no-one wants to turn to the dark side of making-people-happy, but perhaps additional flexibility can be added to allow more people to use Fedora? Then when there's a real open source option to flash for all to enjoy that's the end of the story. The number of proprietary vendors of the world not using open standards AND with a technology that almost everyone use (like Adobe Flash) - are getting fewer and fewer, thanks to open standards and open source, so hopefully this is all a temporary issue. Larger user base or a solid open source platform? Are issues like this one really so fundamental so that we cannot have both? I bought into what Linus Torvalds wrote about development in the kernel. Quote ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477#c38 ) "So in the kernel we have a pretty strict "no regressions" rule, and that if people depend on interfaces we exported having side effects that weren't intentional, we try to fix things so that they still work unless there is a major reason not to." End Quote Is there really a major reason for Fedora not to try and fix this temporary? Happy users? -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/18/2010 04:47 PM, Jakub Jelinek wrote: > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 04:39:40PM +0100, Magnus Glantz wrote: >> So.. >> Upside of patching: happy users :-) >> Downside of patching: unhappy developers :-( > and unhappy users because their software runs slower, apparently you've > (intentionally?) missed that. There is absolutely no reason to punish all > sanely written apps for one badly written proprietary one. As I said > earlier, if you can't live without the proprietary blob and for whatever > reason can't just use the 32-bit one using nspluginwrapper (as 64-bit one is > not in a yum repository using the 64-bit one is a security risk, because > very few people will keep tracking new versions of it, downloading them as > tarball and installing them), let's do the workarounds in nspluginwrapper or > browser for libflashplayer.so only, not in glibc where it will affect all > apps. > > Jakub Absolutely, I expressed myself a bit unclear. I'm sorry for that. I meant patching in general, doesn't have to be glibc. Just temporarily solving the issue, in general by patching something :-) //M -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/18/2010 05:17 PM, Emmanuel Seyman wrote: > * Magnus Glantz [18/11/2010 17:07] : >> I meant patching in general, doesn't have to be glibc. Just temporarily >> solving the issue, in general by patching something :-) > I'm unclear as why you feel the 'something' in question should be anything > other than libflashplayer.so . > > Emmanuel > Check previous posts in this thread -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility
On 11/22/2010 11:52 AM, Andrew Haley wrote: > On 11/19/2010 09:41 PM, Matej Cepl wrote: >> Dne 19.11.2010 15:40, Przemek Klosowski napsal(a): >>> - freeze glibc to avoid this bug ever (OK, maybe this one isn't serious) >>> - fix glibc or the flash wrapper to accommodate the buggy clients >>> - bug Adobe to fix the bug ASAP, do nothing in Fedora >>> - refuse to use flash and work towards replacing it with Free software >> Install nspluginwrapper.x86_64, nspluginwrapper.i686, flash-plugin.i686, >> alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.22-1.fc13.x86_64, and >> alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.22-1.fc13.i686 with all required >> dependencies (yes, there is a lot of them, how much are you willing to >> sacrifice for your YouTube?). Restart Firefox and enjoy! >> >> Aside from actually working, flash-plugin.i686 >> (http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash and select "Yum repository") is >> actually updated so you don't fall so fast victim to all nastiness on >> the web. 64bit one is IIRC not-upgraded so you can get your browser hosed. > That's a good answer. I wonder how we can make sure that people do this. > > Andrew. With guides on for example: * fedoraproject.org * fedorasolved.org * fedoraforum.org * fedora project members blogs As there are a lot of good reasons not to run the 64-bit version at the moment, that makes complete sense. //M -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
