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Fl0wer.png.html

demoseen.com

111 pointsent73 comments

Huh, didn't think this would be posted. This is a little demo effect I threw together last week when I was bored. It's built on top of WebGL (the effect itself is really just in a shader), and the reason it looks like a PNG is that it's a self-extracting PNG as described in my article here: http://daeken.com/superpacking-js-demos

(Note: I'm not blaming anyone!)

Impressive: Firefox hold fine and rendered it, but after I opened it the second time, all the text in my system (that includes the browser, but also the terminals, Awesome, etc) was FUBAR - even after restarting the X server!

I have no idea what kind of bug leads to only the text being corrupted (so, it doesn't seem a bug in the graphic drivers, since AFAIK they're agnostic to that) but survives restarting the display manager.

I've had similar experiences with graphical corruption in X, and Firefox was almost always involved. Same radeon driver as you. And it seems to be distro-agnostic: I've seen it with Arch, Gentoo and Mint. All I know is that it's a recent thing: if I run an older version of my Gentoo build, it doesn't happen. But otherwise I see the same results.

I have no idea what to point to, because it's really weird. Scrambles /everything/ that goes through video. (And until now, I figured it was a quirk of my bizarre hardware. Guess not.)

its a bug with cairo and the radeon driver:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47266

on debian you can pin libcairo to fix the issue. /etc/apt/preferences:

  Package: libcairo2
  Pin:version 1.10.2-7
  Pin-Priority: 1001

  Package: libcairo-gobject2
  Pin:version 1.10.2-7
  Pin-Priority: 1001

Fantastic. I've been trying to pinpoint the cause of it since aeons. It's absolutely dreadful in awesome wm and at some point I laid the blame on (cairo-)XCB, or some Xft bug, but it cropped back too, only less often, under gnome/xfce.

That explains it perfectly. My older Gentoo build has an even older version of libcairo installed. Thanks.

I tried zooming in and out in Chrome on Windows 7, and it crashed my NVIDIA kernel mode driver.

Hm. Interesting. Using binary graphics drivers (nvidia et al)? Maybe something corrupted memory. Did it survive even a restart?

I'm using the OSS radeon drivers and no, fortunately it was fine after a reboot :)

Corrupted memory was my first thought, but affecting only text is odd - I mean, the drivers aren't even supposed to know those particular pixels are text, right?

Not necessarily, no, I think graphic cards are aware that certain things are text. For example, I have a thinkpad t400 with two graphic cards(ATI and intel), on the ATI the text in consoles is not anti-aliased, but on the intel one it is. So I'm pretty sure that the graphic card(or at least the drivers) are aware of what is text and what is not to some extent

In Firefox 12, if I click on the View menu and leave the menu open for a while, it turns into some sort of odd colour gradient.

Interesting bug... can anyone else reproduce this?

In Arch / Chromium / Intel card, and after starting Chromium disabling the webgl graphic cards blacklist, it just shuts my monitor down and I have to reboot.

I think the comments hilight very nicely why some people are not all that thrilled about having OpenGL in their browsers in the form of WebGL. Graphics drivers seem to be extremely difficult to "get right", especially if any degree of performance is wanted.

My considered opinion (from the industry) is that its really shocking how under-invested-in the drivers are.

If a fraction of the effort that went into making the card went into making the drivers and maintaining and fixing them, we'd all be massively better off.

The problem may be too much investment in drivers. Modern graphics card drivers are little operating systems unto themselves; they even have built-in compilers. They are incredibly complex, yet written in unsafe languages for maximum performance, with tons of ugly hacks for compatibility.

What we really need is a simplification of graphics APIs so that graphics drivers don't need to be so complex. That may be impossible without convergence in hardware though.

Not really.

That graphics drivers are a mess internally says more about the insufficient resourcing to do it properly and cleanly and refactor than it does about the really rather trivial and well-understood APIs that the driver implements.

You think OpenGL and DirectX are "trivial"? I'm sorry, but an API that involves passing text strings of complete programs for the driver to compile, link, and asynchronously run on a vector coprocessor is not trivial to implement, not to mention the complex NUMA memory management going on.

I don't know if drivers are really under-invested. I did couple of quick searches at nVidia site (as an example) and got the following results:

    Keyword   Job openings
    driver    176
    software  387
    hardware  218
    asic      117

The keywords were picked arbitarily, and are probably not very representative, but it seems like at least nVidia is actually investing in driver/software developement.

FYI, NoScript has a "Forbid WebGL" option which lets you selectively allow it in the same way it does with Flash, Java and SilverLight.

I think we need to start using a [WebGL] tag or something for these... obviously some browsers don't take it well, and it would keep a lid on all the (kinda pointless) "Doesn't work"/"works for me" comments.

Works for me. Super cool.

In some cases, it's even worse. Low end netbooks running Chrome will load the page and then the entire machine locks up as the WebGL starts rendering and takes over the weak GPU. Easy way of DOSing someone is to send them a WebGL link if they're on a weak computer.

It worked the first time in chrome. Crashed it the second time. Very clever.

The blackhat-spidy-sense in me is getting a tingle. XSS injection if a PNG could used to execute javascript possibly.

This can't be used for XSS or the like, really. The way it works is that the PNG is first interpreted as HTML by the browser (hence the filename) and then it loads itself into an image tag, causing it to be interpreted as a PNG. Once it's loaded into the image tag, the image is drawn to a canvas so that the code -- embedded in the PNG -- can be extracted and executed.

While fun, the only real security concern here is that it's really good at pissing off IDSes.

Edit: I linked my article describing the technique in another comment here if you want to see how horrible it really is. I'm always both proud of and disgusted by myself for this technique.

It did actually uncover something. A huge leak in chrome for me. While this is running Chrome memory usage just climbs and climbs. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/586869/Screenshots/chrome%20leak.png

I just dug into and can confirm. MIME is returned as text/html and browser reads it as such. still very clever.

It's actually kind of a good test of browser compliance in a sick way.

The Duff's Device of browsers? :)

This crashed my mac entirely. avoid.

If viewing a web page crashes your OS, seriously, you need to take that crap back and get a refund.

How do I get a refund on my Arch setup? Seriously, WebGL talks to the driver almost directly. All it takes is a browser/driver bug and the whole display stack goes down, possibly bringing the OS with it.

Good thing we don't use composited rendering these days, or rely on hardware-accelerated interfaces.

Oh wait.

This didn't crash my mac entirely. don't avoid.

Same here. Had to reboot.

What browser are you using? Worked fine for me on Chrome.

Chrome 20. browser went full-screen, all white. Couldn't even force quit, had to reboot.

Same here, on Chrome stable (18.whatever).

It worked OK using latest stable Chrome on OS X 10.6.8

Same situation, worked perfectly for me.

Worked great on my mac.

OS X 10.7.3 Safari 5.1.5 here and had no problems.

Granted it didn't work... No hangs or crashes though.

In Safari you need to enable WebGL from the Develop menu, which is in turn enabled from the Advanced tab of Preferences.

It is enabled; still doesn't work.

Worked great here using Ubuntu 12.04/Firefox 12 on my Thinkpad T420 with integrated Intel graphics only.

Works on Chrome/MacLion

... but I'm not sure what it's doing

If you're having WebGL/video driver issues and you'd like to assist the developers in fixing them, here's a link to a crowdsourced driver test at Khronos: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/CrowdsourcingDriverTesting

Not seeing anything (totally white browser) in both Firefox 12 and Chromium 18 on Ubuntu.

>Ubuntu

There's your problem. Are you using an ATI card, by the way?

Make sure you have restricted drivers installed. If you're using an ATI card you'll have to do the further step of going to about:flags in Chrome and making it ignore the software rendering blacklist.

Actually I'm on a nVidia Quadro card with the Nouveau driver.

All I see is the text "‰PNG IHDR[$‘þVœjawh". MIME type screw up server side?

NoScript is the new subject for "I run Linux, I don't have to worry about..." But after I enabled scripting it worked fine, very neat-looking demo. Also I admit that I enjoy reading about the problems of others here...

Crashed Firefox 12 on OS X. Crashed latest Opera Mobile on Android ICS.

Shame. It's not working on Safari 5.2 beta (Lion 10.7.3); nor does it work in Opera, or any of iOS browsers. But is fine on both Chrome and Firefox...

I'm sure Safari supported WebGL...

There's an option in the Develop menu to enable WebGL, but even with that on this doesn't work.

Doesn't work in Safari.

The file seems to be a png with some html tags in it that trick the browser. Seems to work on firefox and conkeror but not on my chromium.

Works in Chrome/Windows.

Ah! My browser! I lost my thesis :(

What kind of crappy online editor are you using that doesn't save continuously?

Office Live. You have to click on the save button. I'm not even making this up.

You mean the one with a floppy disk (honest question: I'm not even remotely a Office Live user)?

Doesn't work on Chromium/Ubuntu.

18.0.1025.151 (Developer Build 130497 Linux) Ubuntu 12.04

Works for me. And I have exactly the same version as you. (But I am running Xubuntu if that matters).

18.0.1025.151 (Developer Build 130497 Linux) Ubuntu 12.04

For this kind of bug you should specify your graphics module, GLX setup, etc...

Works for me on Chrome 18.0.1025.162/Ubuntu 11.04

Note: Chrome, not Chromium.

Same here.

1) Restricted Drivers

2) about:flags disable software rendering blacklist

Had no effect in Opera 12 alpha with HW acceleration and webgl turned on, just black screen

Works, Amazing, I think you accidently just created a way to hypnotize people in a second.

Shouldn't there be some kind of seizure warning to go with the link?

Goes well with trance music. Keep forgetting it's not in the demo.

I'm freakin' out, man!

This crashed my OSX Lion running Chrome, lost all my work and had to reboot. Just tested Firefox too, crashes as well. Safari doesn't load anything, just a bunch of PNG binary text? Might want to work on compatibility ;)

.. same platform but none of the problems you experienced, perhaps you're using some old versions ?

What is this supposed to do, other than attempt to crash my browser?

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