[solved] Firefox and Thunderbird do only start as root

[the_bat]

Hi,

suddenly Firefox and Thunderbird will only start as user root.

I tried to remove my profiles and also created a new completely empty user. All the same, the will not start and only say:

thunderbird-bin exited with non-zero status (1)

resp.

firefox-bin exited with non-zero status (1)

.

I also tried to remerge them and tried the -bin versions, all the same.

Any further ideas?

[mmoufid]

Is your user in the video group?

[the_bat]

No, I have no such group on my system.

Should I? Since when?

Cheers.

[the_bat]

Ok, here ist what happened:

About a week ago I increased my limits (specificly the stack size) to about 1GB of ram as a scientific application required that much.

Yesterday my machine crashed on suspend and I had to restart making the change of limits active in my main login session for the first time.

As it turns out, firefox decides that it would be a good idea to get all the ram that the limits allows, at once, via anonymous mmap(). The kernel again decides not to grant this mmap and firefox basically just says goodbye at this point.

I did some heavy stracing and compared differences between the root run and the normal user run.

I still don't know why as root it does not try to get so much memory though.

I reduced the limits to about 100 MB and both programs work again.