Chrome 20 on Linux Crashing with 3D Acceleration Enabled

Greetings,

Has anyone else been experiencing crashes with Chrome 20 (latest release) on Linux with 3D acceleration enabled? The crashes are brutal - it takes down the entire VM and instantly halts everything in its tracks. When I turn off 3D acceleration, I am able to use Chrome in the environment again but without 3D acceleration I am stuck using one of the older windows managers (which is awful).

Has anyone discovered a workaround?

 

I am encountering the same problem with both stable and beta Chrome. No idea how to fix it, but hopefully we're not the only ones!

 

Parallels Support

I got a response back from support - apparently the latest version of Ubuntu and in fact the 11.x series of Ubuntu is NOT SUPPORTED. As a result, it doesn't seem like Parallels will be willing to address this so we just need to hope Google steps up. It's appalling to me that the last officially supported version is 10.10 which is two versions back.

I'm going to need to find other options because I am sad to say, while Parallels is generally zippy when it works - between the VM crashes I get all the time, the weirdness with Lion full screen, and just an endless amount of drama installing/reinstalling Parallels tools and now this, I am at my wits end.

 

Wow, that's really disappointing...especially since Parallels is so much faster than VMWare (and VMWare doesn't even pretend to support 3D acceleration in Linux). I've been planning to switch to a native Ubuntu install at some point in the future anyway, but this might spur me to get that project going sooner.

Thanks for the information!

 

Hi Han-ShenY,
could you please tell me some more details about your support contact? Who told you this?

Thanks in advance,
Hanna

 

The top link says only Ubuntu 10.10 is supported. The bottom link says up up to 11.10 is supported (which is a slightly better policy). Either way, I've sent multiple crash logs to your service, filed a ticket referencing the crash logs and this is the response I got.

In fairness, I did try Chrome on 10.10 by bringing up a different virtual machine - but frankly, Ubuntu 10.10 works quite poorly with Parallels. There are window artifact/portal sizing issues (even with PT installed) that make it even more unusable despite the working copy of Chrome.

 

Han-ShenY,
thank you for the information; we will investigate the situation.
Anyway, I can ensure you we support Ubuntu up to 12.10 since the build 7.0.15094.

Regards,
Hanna

 

Thank goodness someone is looking into this problem. It is so danged annoying.

 

I have the same problem using latest Parallels Desktop with kubuntu 12.04 64bit running.

 

Guys,
thank you for the feedback. To understand what's going on we need a bit more data, so could you please do the following:
1) go to Parallels Desktop menu-Preferences-Advanced and check "Use detailed log message" checkbox;
2) reproduce the situation;
3) create Problem Report (Help-Report a Problem) and give me an ID;
4) inside the VM, in your guest system, find files:
- /etc/x11/xorg.conf
- /var/log/Xorg.log
- /var/log/parallels.log
- /var/log/parallels-tools-installation.log
5) and send me all the stuff (files and Problem Report IDs) to hanna@parallels.com

Thank you in advance,
Hanna

 

I have sent the requested info. Thanks for the help.

 

Update?

Any update on this issue? I'm experiencing the same problem with the following setup:

Host OS: Mac OS X 10.7
Guest OS: Ubuntu 12.04
Parallels Version: 7.0.15104

Thanks!

 

Same crash

Chrome: 20.0.1132.57
OSX: 10.7.4 (fully updated)
Ubuntu 12.04 w/ Gnome 3 Shell (fully apt updated)
Parallels Version: 7.0.15104 (updated yesterday)

Previously, I thought the crash was only related to Flash in Chrome 20. (Switching from built-in Flash to system Flash helped on several sites.) However, I Chrome crashes the VM going to this site: http://abhizweblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/gnome-3-themes-how-to-install-gnome-3.html.

This site doesn't seem to need flash, so it looks like the Chrome 20 crash problem doesn't require Flash to be part of the picture.

Do any of you get crashes on this website? Firefox renders this site fine.

This issue is so scary because I never know when browsing to a "harmless" site will crash my whole VM!

Has anyone determined if the Parallels engineering team has been able to reproduce this? It seems like it should be VERY easy to reproduce in the above configuration of software versions.

 

The latest chrome seems slightly more stable. I also noticed this was a bigger issue with 3D acceleration turned on (however with it off, you might not be able to run your favorite shell). You might be able to limp along if you don't need 3D acceleration on.

Either way, this is a major issue. For now, I've resorted to using the host machine's browser to fill these needs (which is not ideal for so many reasons).

 

Problem Report Filed

Hi Han-ShenY,

I just submitted a Parallels Problem Report containing all the info that hanna@parallels.com requested earlier in this thread (logs, xorg conf, etc.). Hopefully this will enable Parallels engineers to easily reproduce the issue in their environment. I wish they would post a message on this thread indicating whether or not they have been able to reproduce the issue in their testing environment. It has been several days since Jeffrey Stevison submitted his crash data. I don't know if Parallels has been able to repro since that time.

Instead of using the browser in the host, I have resorted to carefully proceeding to use Chrome in Linux (although I know it's just a timebomb waiting to go off when I navigate to an affected website). Most websites I go to are harmless, but when I'm least suspecting it, I hit a site which blows up the VM. If I continue to get more VM crashes, I'll probably switch to using Firefox in the guest, rather than switching over to using Chrome in the host OS. I have never hit a VM crash using Firefox (version 12, 13, or 14). The issue seems to be only when using Chrome 20.

I have been a Parallels user since Parallels 5 on OSX 10.6 (where I have run many different Linux distros). I have never seen actual VM crashes until this issue. Argh!! I hate computers.

One good thing worth mentioning is that at least Parallels makes this issue possible. VMware Fusion doesn't currently even attempt to support 3d acceleration in Linux guests. 3d Linux acceleration is one of the biggest strengths Parallels has over Fusion.

 

Adding a "me too" in case Parallels thinks this doesn't impact more than a handful of people. I can disable 3D, but everything looks much crappier (like Fusion heh). Hoping for a fix in the next release.

 

Any progress?

Hi Hanna,

There have been several users experiencing this issue. Two of us have uploaded Problem diagnostic info in the past week. Can we receive confirmation from Parallels whether or not Parallels engineering is able to reproduce this issue? It is possible that this issue is complex and won't be resolved instantly. However, it would be nice to know if any reproduction progress has been made.

VM crashes are an extremely serious issue. It would be good to know that this issue is being investigated by Parallels.

Thanks.

 

VMware Fusion 2012 Tech Preview (slightly off-topic)

As another data point, I just installed the Fusion 2012 Tech Preview from June 2012 (w/ Ubuntu 12.04): http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/fusiontp2012

It seems pretty sweet. It's got 3D OpenGL acceleration in Linux guests. I have Ubuntu 12.04 running w/ Gnome 3 and 3D Ubuntu Unity. Google Chrome seems to be running pretty nicely without the crashes experienced in Parallels Desktop 7.

If any others are interested in trying out the Fusion Tech Preview 2012, it would be interesting to see your responses related to this particular Chrome crashing issue.

At this point, Fusion seems rock solid, but Parallels UI experience seems a bit snappier. Screen redraws and scrolling with the MacBook Trackpad seems snappier in Parallels.

 

FWIW, this also happens to me with 3D acceleration disabled.

I'm running Parallels Build 6.0.12106 on OSX 10.6.8. I tried turning off 3D acceleration
and also Vertical Synchronization to no avail. Also fiddling with the amount of
video memory did not make any difference.

The guest OS is Ubuntu 12.04 running Chrome 20.0.1132.57. When I open a webpage
with flash content, the whole VM crashes.

 

Hi FerdinandG,

Have you tried switching between the Flash which is embedded in Chrome and the system Flash? (You can navigate to "chrome://plugins/". Click "Details" and you should see 2 separate Flash installations. You can experiment with enabling/disabling each Flash instance there.)

-ewh