Saturday, February 19, 2011

Chromium Crash

Oh lovely. I actually had chromium browser (Debian package 9.0.597.98~r74359-1) crash the system today. I down graded to the previous package and it seems to be OK. It's very curious because chromium was upgraded two days ago. Why did it take so long for trouble to show up? And there no bug reports yet, so it's not a common problem. Now that is really worrying. The crashy version was a security update too, so now I'm running a version with known exploits. Oh yes, this just gets better and better.

It's so rare for a user application to take down the whole system on Linux. According the logs, the kernel's out-of-memory killer shut down chromium several times. The browser's multiprocess design probably made that harder if all the processes were leaking memory simultaneously, like an OOM wack-a-mole. After the reboot but before the down grade, chromium's behaviour was completely erratic. The plugins kept crashing and disabling them didn't help at tall. I even got the "Aw, snap" error message on the Google search page, which was kind of ironic coming from the Google browser.

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