Mac OSX Player Issue: kernel: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero.

Question

We posted a blog entry trying to investigate the Console.app error log messages that appear when using the Adobe Flash Player on OSX (32bit and 64bit affected, 10.7 Lion, Player version 10.3 and 11.0).
find our Blog entry here: http://www.nanofunk.net/mac-osx-lion-10-7-system-freezes-kernel-iosurface-buffer-allocatio n-size-is-zero-console-message/
The Message that appears is
kernel: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero
To reproduce the issue, use this steps
click on "Clear Display" in Console.app
go to http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ and the error will show up in the console.
Sometimes, this freezes the whole OSX system, with a spinning beachball for at least 20seconds, up to five minutes.
This is inacceptable. We are hoping to hear back from Apple or Adobe ASAP.
Please try to reproduce this on your OSX installation and post the results to this thread.
thanks,
nanofunk.net

Answer 1

As far as I've been able to discover, this bug is specific to WebKit browsers running (Chrome and Safari are based on WebKit).  Perhaps it is related to those browsers running plugins (like Flash) and using an IOSurface to pass the rendering data back from the plugin.  This issue was constant on my late 2010 MBP and would freeze the machine entirely once a day.  Having switched to using Firefox or Opera I no longer see ANY messages for "IOSurface: Buffer allocation size is zero".  Thankfully, this also comes without any more freezing when time machine starts up or at any other time.
It looks like there are a lot of changes going on in WebKit relating to IOSurface usage (http://svnsearch.org/svnsearch/repos/WEBKIT/search?logMessage=iosurface).  Hopefully this will be fixed very soon.