[snap] Tab goes blank even after reloads (and no refresh is happening)

[Natalia Bidart]

Using chromium from stable:

installed: 83.0.4103.61 (1165) 163MB

after a few hours of having it opened, some tabs started showing a blank page (google spreadsheets, google calendar). Even after hitting F5 or hard reloads, the browser will show the content is being re-fetched, but nothing is rendered.

This is happening while chromium is NOT being refreshed:

nessita@dali:~$ snap changes
ID Status Spawn Ready Summary
125 Done yesterday at 12:09 -03 yesterday at 12:09 -03 Auto-refresh snap "lxd"

nessita@dali:~$

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for the report Natalia, and for discarding the obvious suspicion that this might have been caused by a refresh in the background.

I understand this is the first time you're observing this problem?

Do you have extensions installed? (maybe an extension affecting google webapps was itself silently updated and requires a browser restart?)

Can you open the same URLs that won't render in a new tab, and do they render correctly there?

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

Hey Oliver, thanks for your attention to this bug.

The issue happened again, I tried to open a google doc, new url and new tab, and it does not render. Again, I checked for refreshes and all I have is:

nessita@dali:~$ date
Fri 29 May 2020 06:42:07 PM -03

nessita@dali:~$ snap changes
ID Status Spawn Ready Summary
128 Done today at 01:30 -03 today at 01:31 -03 Auto-refresh snap "lxd"

nessita@dali:~$

I have only 2 extensions installed: pagerduty and thegreatsuspender. The latter was updated this morning without showing any issue after update. I opened many new tabs since the update (that was about 5 hours ago).

I tried another new tab, and as before I do get the browser title set and there are a few google redirects that happens, but the final doc/page is never shown, I only get a blank page.

Can I provide any extra information to keep debugging this issue?

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

More information: since the last comment (late Friday) the blank tab occurs every time I open a new tab, in either the main chromium window or an incognito window. There is nothing that I could find in the logs.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for the additional information Natalia.

Are there apparmor denials in the journal for chromium?

Are your extensions enabled while in incognito mode (that's a per-extension setting, and it is disabled by default)?

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

Hey Oliver,

> Are there apparmor denials in the journal for chromium?

Yes, what I've found is:

May 28 12:53:03 dali kernel: audit: type=1400 audit(1590681183.513:115): apparmor="DENIED" operation="open" profile="snap.chromium.chromium" name="/etc/fstab" pid=29925 comm="chrome" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=1000 ouid=0

May 28 12:53:07 dali kernel: audit: type=1400 audit(1590681187.237:119): apparmor="DENIED" operation="open" profile="snap.chromium.chromium" name="/run/mount/utab" pid=29925 comm="chrome" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=1000 ouid=0

> Are your extensions enabled while in incognito mode (that's a per-extension setting, and it is disabled by default)?

I checked and both extensions are not enabled in incognito mode.

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

Running this in focal, I started the chromium snap with debug enabled as Oliver suggested in IRC. When the tab went blank (black in the incognito), I got a never ending stream of these errors:

[3245519:3245983:0604/121824.098686:WARNING:syncer_proto_util.cc(361)] Error posting from syncer: Response Code (bogus on error): 401 Content-Length (bogus on error): 5 Server Status: SYNC_AUTH_ERROR
...
[3245733:3245733:0604/122913.673580:ERROR:gl_context_glx.cc(227)] Couldn't make context current with X drawable.
[3245733:3245733:0604/122913.673654:ERROR:gles2_command_buffer_stub.cc(327)] ContextResult::kTransientFailure: Failed to make context current.
[3245733:3245733:0604/122913.674703:WARNING:x11_util.cc(1522)] X error received: serial 824243, error_code 170 (GLXBadContext), request_code 154, minor_code 26 (Unknown)
[3245733:3245733:0604/122913.676000:WARNING:x11_util.cc(1522)] X error received: serial 824244, error_code 170 (GLXBadContext), request_code 154, minor_code 4 (Unknown)
[3245733:3245733:0604/122913.676936:WARNING:x11_util.cc(1522)] X error received: serial 824305, error_code 170 (GLXBadContext), request_code 154, minor_code 26 (Unknown)
[3245733:3245733:0604/122913.677780:WARNING:x11_util.cc(1522)] X error received: serial 824306, error_code 170 (GLXBadContext), request_code 154, minor_code 4 (Unknown)
[3245733:3245733:0604/122913.681235:ERROR:gl_context_glx.cc(227)] Couldn't make context current with X drawable.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

For reference, I'm attaching a complete log file provided by Natalia, suitably trimmed off irrelevant/private information, beginning where the errors started occurring.

This is the beginning of that log file:

[3837270:3837270:0609/103951.281220:ERROR:shared_image_representation.cc(151)] Attempt to read from an uninitialized SharedImage
[3837270:3837270:0609/104212.270228:ERROR:gl_context_glx.cc(227)] Couldn't make context current with X drawable.
[3837270:3837270:0609/104212.273762:ERROR:gles2_command_buffer_stub.cc(327)] ContextResult::kTransientFailure: Failed to make context current.
[3837270:3837270:0609/104212.275364:WARNING:x11_util.cc(1522)] X error received: serial 78991, error_code 170 (GLXBadContext), request_code 154, minor_code 26 (Unknown)
[3837270:3837270:0609/104212.276739:WARNING:x11_util.cc(1522)] X error received: serial 78993, error_code 170 (GLXBadContext), request_code 154, minor_code 4 (Unknown)

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Possibly related: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1082622

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Natalia, would you mind opening chrome://gpu, saving the page and attaching it here? Thanks!

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

I've been running Chrome from the official .deb for 10 days and never had the described issue.

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

A week later and Chrome from the .deb has never presented this blank-tab issue.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for the heads up Natalia. So that's definitely a snap-specific issue.

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

Would it be useful for debugging purposes if I switch back to the Chromium snap?

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Sorry for the late answer. At this point I'm not sure how to move this forward, unfortunately. Switching back to the chromium snap would be useful in case a new upstream version solves the problem (there has been recent activity on the upstream bug report I linked to, so there's still hope). But I understand that this bug is negatively affecting your productivity so it's up to you really.

[Natalia Bidart (nataliabidart)]

Thanks! I will monitor this bug for updates, I rather use Chromium than Chrome.