chromium 6 hard locks the machine when opening a new window

[a1291762]

Binary package hint: chromium-browser

Chromium 6.0.472.53 was installed on my machine sometime in the last week. There is a problem that causes my entire machine to lockup (kernel oops, as far as I can tell).

System setup/info
- Linux bq-erebus 2.6.32-24-generic-pae #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 20 15:37:22 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
- The nvidia-current package is providing a driver for the NVIDIA card in the machine (GeForce 9500 GT).
- Ubuntu 10.04
- Kubuntu installed and active (ie. KDE 4 is my desktop)

Steps to reproduce
1) Start chromium which opens the windows/tabs from before. For me this is 4 windows with 20-30 tabs between them. The contents of the tabs include Pulse, JIRA and Bugzilla installations. Unfortunately, they're all intranet sites or I'd supply URLs.
2) Open a new chromium window by clicking the icon in the panel (this runs chromium-browser which tells the running instance to make a new window).

Expected behaviour
1) Window opens.
2) Home page loads.

Observed behaviour
1) Window opens.
2) Machine locks up hard.
3) Keyboard lights flash.
4) Machine cannot be pinged.
5) Hard drive is not making noise.
6) Display does not update.
7) Keyboard/Mouse have no effect.
8) Power must be manually cycled.

Note that this is not 100% reliable. I believe I had Chromium 6 running for several days before I first had this problem. I have not experienced this problem 3 times over 2 days.

Given the way this fails, reproducing it may prove to be difficult. I'm not sure if the existing windows/tabs have any impact on the issue. I'm including some hints from our IT guys (who have dealt with similar symtpoms).
- Desktop Effects/Compiz are known to cause these symptoms. I was running Compiz and had Desktop Effects enabled. However even after disabling Desktop Effects and switching to KWin the problem persists.
- I was using the non-PAE kernel. I switched to the PAE kernel to get access to the full 4GB of RAM installed in my machine. That involved re-installing the NVIDIA driver. This had no effect on the problem.
- I cannot reproduce this with Chromium 5.x.
- The previous instances where similar symptoms were observed was traced down to some mixup/race between the compositing stuff in X and the input event stuff in X.

Based on the above, my completely speculative suggestion is that Chromium 6 includes some kind of "accelerated" rendering (eg. WebKit using OpenGL directly) and this is triggering a bug down in X or the kernel or the driver.

Downgrading to Chromium 5.x has given me a browser that works but it can't read the profile and I can't find a backup of the profile. Since I'm already in a compromised situation I might try backing up the chromium profile, blowing it away and seeing if I can reproduce the bug without the intranet sites loaded.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: chromium-browser 5.0.342.9~r43360-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.42-generic-pae 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Sep 16 15:34:21 2010
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 LC_COLLATE=POSIX
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: chromium-browser

[a1291762 (a1291762)]

So the good news is that even after I removed my profile (~/.config/chromium), I could still reproduce this problem.

Also, my icon runs chromium-browser --new-window, in case that matters.

So the steps to reproduce are just:
1) Start Chromium.
2) Run chromium-browser --new-window.

However, while this reproduced the problem for me it's still not 100% reproducible. I have tried and failed to reproduce it a few times after booting the machine after it locked up before.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Closing due to the last update to this bug being almost 7 years old. Please file a new bug if this still applies to recent releases of chromium-browser.