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I just started Firefox on my Gentoo machine upon which it crashed with

ATTENTION: default value of option force_s3tc_enable overridden by environment.

Now, a bit of research gave me nothing tangible but the vague impression that the root cause of this is somewhere close to graphics and mesa. Indeed, greping everything for force_s3tc_enable hit a few shared object files under /usr/lib/mesa/. My impression was further reinforced by this posting.

Anyway, whenever I launch Firefox, it (a) crashes immediately or (b) offers me (b1) to start in safe browsing mode (which works) or (b2) to clean up firefox (which crashes). (a) and (b) alternate perfectly. Setting an environment variable with the name force_s3tc_enable (obvious choices were true and false) has no noticeable effect whatsoever. I remember that I had a similar problem with Google Chrome a while ago but somehow it went mysteriously away, I don't recall any details.

So... what is the cause for the problem and how can I fix it?

Details of the installation

The system is running in a VMware virtual machine where I use the VMware video driver. Mesa is mesa-12.0.1 and Firefox is firefox-45.4.0. (Further details available on request, I don't want to dump the entire emerge --info output here without need.)

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All right, as it turns out, the observed crashes have nothing at all to do with the ATTENTION message or with mesa. It just happens that I use Hardened Gentoo and thus PAX memory protection is at work here. After adjusting the PAX flags via paxctl-ng -m /usr/lib/firefox/firefox firefox runs as expected without disruption. (The ATTENTION message still appears.)

Lesson learnt: If you use Hardened Gentoo (or, more specifically, GrSecurity+PAX) and you observe mysterious chrashes, check out whether PAX is involved (check the system log files that collect kernel messages) and adjust the PAX flags as needed.

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