Qt WebEngine crashes with nouveau in Linux

[Christoph Thielecke]

I have crashes of kmail when displaying mails (e.g. GMX info mail). After some research I found that it is related to the qtwebengine when using nouveau driver.

The reason is, that Qt WebEngine uses multi-threaded OpenGL, which nouveau does not support.
It also crashes when running on wayland, the cause is not yet known.
Work around these issues by not doing GPU-accelerated rendering in such cases.

This happens on 18.04.3 (bionic), 19.10 (eoan) and 20.04 (focal).

See also: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-41242

There was a patch made: Antonio Larrosa (25 Oct '16 12:04 PM):
"I made the disable-gpu-when-using-nouveau-boo-1005323.diff patch (attached) for the webengine openSUSE packages. It checks if the openGL driver vendor is "nouveau" and if it is, it disables the GPU in the web engine context . This fixes the crashes in my test system.

The patch also adds two environment variables, QT_WEBENGINE_DISABLE_GPU, which forces disabling the GPU and QT_WEBENGINE_DISABLE_NOUVEAU_WORKAROUND, which disables the nouveau detection code, just in case anybody wants to test newer nouveau releases in the future to see if they behave properly."

I adapted this patch for bionic (5.9.5+dfsg-0ubuntu2) and attach the modified patch (disable-gpu-when-using-nouveau_boo_1005323_qtwebengine_5.9.5.diff)

[Christoph Thielecke (crissi99)]

Sorry, the first patch was and old patch, containing one bracket too much, please find correct patch attached.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "check for nouveau driver on qtwebengine and disable gpu in this case, can be overridden by envionment variable" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

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