[solved] Chromium 87 not working

[ticojohn]

I recently updated/upgraded to the newest version of chromium. It is totally unresponsive to inputs to the search and URL bar.
I am running Debian 10.7, XFCE desktop with lightdm. The gnome keyring is installed and enabled at startup. There is only one entry in the journal that is related to chromium and it is this:

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Jan 21 14:14:06 debian audit[390]: AVC apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" profile="unconfined" name="/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lightdm/lightdm-guest-session//chromium" pid=390 comm="apparmor_parser"

The previous version of chromium worked with no problems. This doesn't bother me so much, as I mostly use Firefox-esr, but I have a friend that uses chromium and I have suggested to him that he not perform any updates until I can find out what might be the issue.

Hopefully this isn't just an operator error on my part but if others are having similar problems, and have a fix, I would appreciate assistance. Thank you.

[arochester]

Update/upgrade again to see if there is a replacement?

I am using Version 87.0.4280.88.

[ticojohn]

Update/upgrade again to see if there is a replacement?

I am using Version 87.0.4280.88.

87.0.4280.141 is installed as per the update of a couple days ago.

[ticojohn]

New info. I am now seeing the following message in the journal.

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15:48:46 debian dbus-daemon[1175]: [session uid=1000 pid=1175] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.secrets' requested by ':1.66' (uid=1000 pid=3808 comm="/usr/lib/chromium/chromium --show-component-extens")
Jan 21 15:48:46 debian dbus-daemon[1175]: [session uid=1000 pid=1175] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.secrets'
Jan 21 15:48:46 debian gnome-keyring-daemon[1164]: couldn't allocate secure memory to keep passwords and or keys from being written to the disk
Jan 21 15:48:46 debian gnome-keyring-daemon[1164]: asked to register item /org/freedesktop/secrets/collection/login/58, but it's already registered

I'm not an expert but but might this be an indication of the problem?

[ticojohn]

Another piece of hopefully useful information. I launched chromium from a terminal and got this:

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john@debian:~$ chromium
[7903:7903:0121/173257.828898:ERROR:sandbox_linux.cc(374)] InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process.

[ticojohn]

One more bit of information. The problem may have something to do with the MESA drivers. See this bug report.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrep ... ug=918433
It is suggested that there is a workaround by setting

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MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE=true

How might that affect the performance of other applications? Can I do that from the command line and does it revert back to false if I logout and log back in?

[ticojohn]

I found a recent bug report for chromium 87.0.4280.141. They found that starting chromium from a terminal using this switch

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 chromium --gpu-sandbox-start-early

would get the browser working. And it does. Here is what is seen in the terminal when launched with that switch.

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john@debian:~$ chromium --gpu-sandbox-start-early
[2525:2525:0122/122710.077203:ERROR:gl_implementation.cc(282)] Failed to load libGL.so.1: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: Operation not permitted
[2525:2525:0122/122710.081976:ERROR:viz_main_impl.cc(150)] Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization
[2545:2545:0122/122710.098621:ERROR:vaapi_wrapper.cc(1246)] Failed to create VaapiWrapper for va_profile: VAProfileJPEGBaseline
[2486:2486:0122/122736.546249:ERROR:gaia_auth_fetcher.cc(73)] Missing ID token on refresh token fetch response.
[2486:2486:0122/122744.745879:ERROR:sharing_service.cc(248)] Device un-registration failed with fatal error

Hopefully the maintainers will update the chromium package to repair this issue. Until then I will use a terminal to launch chromium.
Thanks to those that responded to this post. I will mark the post as solved.

[stevepusser]

Most desktops can use a tool to edit the launch command in the menu so you can add those parameters. menulibre or the like for GNOME, I think.

[ticojohn]

Most desktops can use a tool to edit the launch command in the menu so you can add those parameters. menulibre or the like for GNOME, I think.

Thanks Steve. I actually already created a desktop launcher (Xfce) to do exactly that. I tried to edit the menu item but for some reason it didn't work. But the desktop launcher works fine. I saw that the bug report was downgraded from serious to important, apparently because it doesn't seem to affect all users. Seems strange to me but it might be due to a specific combination of hardware and software that doesn't impact all users. I'm just lucky I guess. As always I appreciate your feedback.

[stevepusser]

I managed to backport chromium_88.0.4324.96 from Sid to a Buster-based MX 19, but it now requires a newer libicu67 backport that MX already had, at least until Debian fixes the current Buster libicu63 patch. https://build.opensuse.org/project/show ... :schmonium

It now takes about four hours to build a package on the six-core MSI gaming laptop, but not an excessive amount of RAM or disk space.

[stevepusser]

Chromium has been updated in Sid to build on a standard Buster base, so there should be a security update in Buster that will upgrade over my OBS version pretty soon, based on past updates. After that, you won't need that libicu67 backport any longer, so that should appear as autoremovable.