Ubuntu 17.04 crashing hard - disable Chrome hardware acceleration

published Aug 20, 2017 05:50 by admin ( last modified Aug 22, 2017 12:37 )

Today my Ubuntu 17.04 crashed hard a couple of times. Even the cursor wouldn't move. After having restarted (again) I used journalctl on the command line, to view what were the messages from the previous boot.

journalctl -b -1

(You need to have journalctl configured to save log messages from previous boots, for this to work)

The very last message was in red and said:

RIP: gen8_ppgtt_alloc_page_directories.isra.38+0x115/0x250 [i915] RSP: ffffb88ac3aab880

I'm not initimately familar with the log severity codes, but RIP sounds likes it's Rest In Peace which might be a bit late in the chain for diagnostics. But there was a message also in red a bit higher up that began with:

kernel: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000000000000018
kernel: IP: gen8_ppgtt_alloc_page_directories.isra.38+0x115/0x250 [i915]

I googled that and found some ideas, one being to disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome, since that seemed to trigger the bug. It seems to work!

See: Bug #1680904 “zesty unable to handle kernel NULL pointer derefer...” : Bugs : linux package : Ubuntu