Firefox 18 on OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard Macbook Pro May Cause NVIDIA Problems
I upgraded my Macbook Pro to Firefox 18 on OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard on Friday afternoon. My computer froze while I was using Firefox on Saturday. It froze while I was switching windows within Firefox on Sunday. It froze when I was scrolling a Firefox window this morning. I've checked the kernel log, and each time the computer froze I got "NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error" and some related NVIDIA messages.
The rest of my computer still works. I was able to ssh into it and have it play sounds. It's just the screen that was having trouble. That's what you would expect if your video card is freaking out.
I don't know for sure that Firefox is causing this, but it's rather suspicious. It's the only thing I've changed on my system in the last few days.
If you want to check your kernel log, open the Applications folder, open the Utilities folder, and then open Console. Click on All Messages under DATABASE SEARCHES and search for NVDA.
All Replies (7)
Is your graphics driver up to date? This may be the cause of your issue.
Good question. I'm actually not sure how to check that on Snow Leopard.
Or maybe I should say "If they are updated through Apple's Software Update, yes. If I have to update them manually, no."
I did some digging around and found: http://highmac.com/how-to/fix-kernel-nvdaopengl-channel-exception/
Note: The above-mentioned URL would take you to a non-Mozilla Web site. Mozilla does not control and is not responsible for information outside of the support forum.
Unfortunately, the program they recommend doesn't work on Snow Leopard, the version of Flash that seems to be an issue is a really old one, I've already installed the patch from Apple, and I've had my motherboard and graphics card replaced once already. Thanks for digging, though!
Sorry about that. Have you visited Nvidia's website to see if there are any updates? http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
The two updates they have are Quadro updates (not sure how that relates to my GeForce GT 330M) and are for MacBook models 3,1 4,1 and 5,1. I've got 6,2. I'm not sure if either of those will work on my system, or if they'll kill it.