Chromium/Brave/Browser issues with recent drivers/kernels

[hjanuschka]

There are many "this fixed it for me" reports that don't work for others, and we can't reproduce locally. To help prioritize a proper fix, please tell us what worked (or didn't) for you.

make sure to run chromium with a fresh profile to test.

chromium --user-data-dir=/tmp/some_new

(or on every launch)

chromium --user-data-dir=$(mktemp -d)

[jelenv]

None of the above. I fixed it by setting LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi (see: #2800 (comment)). My setup: 2 laptops with AMD iGPU + nVidia dGPU, Hyprland configured to use AMD iGPU as the default.

[jelenv]

I specifically applied the env var only to the browser process, the rest of the system and apps work correctly in the case of GPU acceleration and I did not want to modify this state. See my linked comment on solution details. Would be nice to get my PR merged, to allow application of the fix without omarchy overrides.

[AbuBytes]

This worked for me
and for youtube I had to install the h264ify extension because my AMD gpu couldn't decode AV1
I have NVIDIA as a discrete GPU and thought my iGPU couldn't handle video well, turns out it barely broke a sweat when playing youtube vids at 2K, all good!

[chthollyphile]

None of the above. I first encountered this in omarchy 3.1.3 + chromium 141 (see #2800 ). I also fixed it by adding env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,iHD to my .config/hypr/envs.conf as per this comment: #2800 (comment). The issue is resolved and hasn't recurred on the latest omarchy 3.2.3 + chromium 143.

[dhh]

What's your CPU / GPU combo? Are you seeing any performance issues with this?

[chthollyphile]

What's your CPU / GPU combo? Are you seeing any performance issues with this?

12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12800H (12+8) @ 4.80 GHz
NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU [Discrete]
Intel Iris Xe Graphics @ 1.40 GHz [Integrated]

No noticeable performance issues, hardware acceleration is working properly.

[scossar]

It's possible people are running into two separate issues. For my case I've got a hybrid GPU:

❯ lspci | grep -E "VGA|3D|Display"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA106M [GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q] (rev a1)

After the last Omarchy update Chromium became unusable on web pages that contain videos unless I added either the --disable-gpu-compositing or the --disable-accelerated-video-decode flags to chromium-flags.conf file. I can post the errors I was getting again if that helps.

I think the problem is that Chromium is trying to use the Intel driver, but the Intel VAAPI drivers weren't installed on my system.

The GL_RENDERER line from chrome://gpu:

ANGLE (Intel, Mesa Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics (TGL GT2), OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 25.2.7-arch1.1)

The drivers present in /usr/lib/dri/ (prior to my having manually installed intel-media-driver):

❯ ls /usr/lib/dri/*_drv_video.so
Permissions Size User Date Modified Name
lrwxrwxrwx     - root  5 Dec  2025   /usr/lib/dri/d3d12_drv_video.so -> ../libgallium-25.3.1-arch1.2.so
lrwxrwxrwx     - root  5 Dec  2025   /usr/lib/dri/nouveau_drv_video.so -> ../libgallium-25.3.1-arch1.2.so
.rwxr-xr-x   92k root  8 Jun  2025   /usr/lib/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
lrwxrwxrwx     - root  5 Dec  2025   /usr/lib/dri/r600_drv_video.so -> ../libgallium-25.3.1-arch1.2.so
lrwxrwxrwx     - root  5 Dec  2025   /usr/lib/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so -> ../libgallium-25.3.1-arch1.2.so
lrwxrwxrwx     - root  5 Dec  2025   /usr/lib/dri/virtio_gpu_drv_video.so -> ../libgallium-25.3.1-arch1.2.so

The fix for me was to install intel-media-driver:

sudo pacman -S intel-media-driver

Then edit the LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME in hyprland.conf to change it to the Intel driver:

env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,iHD

This seems to have completely fixed the issue.

I'm wondering if Omarchy is correctly handling hybrid GPUs here: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/32592e2e285b5c9af6d38724be319c4fbef6e221/install/config/hardware/nvidia.sh

[akarray]

@chthollyphile @scossar Glad to hear your setup is working. I’m running a very similar configuration (comparable GPU/CPU), but I’m still struggling to get stable performance on my side.

Would you be willing to share the following (sanitized if needed):
~/.config/chromium-flags.conf
~/.config/uwsm/env-hyprland
~/.config/hypr/envs.conf
/etc/mkinitcpio.conf
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf
Output of: nvidia-smi
Also, could you confirm what GPU mode you’ve set in the BIOS: Discrete (dGPU-only) or Dynamic/Hybrid (switchable graphics)?

Thanks a lot for your help—really appreciated

[scossar]

It's a fairly recent install of Omarchy running on an MSI gaming laptop (Stealth series). I don't think it exposes GPU settings in the BIOS. It always runs in hybrid mode.

chromium-flags.conf (default Omarchy values):

--ozone-platform=wayland
--ozone-platform-hint=wayland
--enable-features=TouchpadOverscrollHistoryNavigation
--load-extension=~/.local/share/omarchy/default/chromium/extensions/copy-url
# Chromium crash workaround for Wayland color management on Hyprland - see https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/11957
--disable-features=WaylandWpColorManagerV1

I don't have a ~/.config/uwsm directory.

I don't have a ~/.config/hypr/envs.conf file. I think Omarchy is now setting the environmental variables in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf. Omarchy adds the Nvidia settings here. I edited that file (although possibly the change will get overriden and I should create and source an envs.conf file for the change.)

The relevant part with my edit:

# NVIDIA environment variables (set by Omarchy):
env = NVD_BACKEND,direct
env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,iHD  # edited by me; was previously set to nvidia
env = __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME,nvidia

I don't think I've touched the mkinitcpio.conf file, although I see a mkinitcpio.conf.backup file. I'm guessing that Omarchy makes changes to it when Nvidia GPUs are detected.

The uncommented lines of mkinitcpio.conf:

MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm )
BINARIES=()
FILES=()
HOOKS=(base udev autodetect microcode modconf kms keyboard keymap consolefont block encrypt filesystems fsck)

The /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf file:

options nvidia_drm modeset=1

The output of nvidia-smi:

Sun Jan  4 10:22:11 2026
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.105.08             Driver Version: 580.105.08     CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 ...    Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   39C    P0             18W /   60W |      26MiB /   6144MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A            1007      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                             4MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            1356      G   Hyprland                                  2MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

As far as I know, the only time I'm using the Nvidia GPU is when doing some programming stuff with CUDA.

[chthollyphile]

I am currently using hybrid GPU mode.
Here is my config files: https://pastebin.com/tR1qs8yg

[GhigaIonut]

@scossar

This is also my case I got:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation AD104 [GeForce RTX 4070 Ti] (rev a1)
10:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Raphael (rev cb)

Everything you mentioned applies. Also if i open with x11 as ozone platform it works but of course the scale is bad.

Hope this can get fixed in the next update

[ashutoshsao]

I am experiencing full system lockups (hard freeze requiring power button reset) rather than just browser errors.

System:

• GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060 (Discrete only, iGPU is disabled/not present)
• Driver: Proprietary 580.105.08
• CPU: Intel i5-8600

Symptoms:

• Random hard usage (Chrome + Docker + Load) leads to a complete system freeze.
• Logs: I am seeing nvidia-gpu ... i2c timeout error and perf: interrupt took too long in the journals from the freeze.

Relevance to Poll:
I suspect the "Ozone/GPU" errors others are seeing are a lighter symptom of a driver regression that causes a full kernel panic/lockup on my configuration.

• Status: I cannot apply the iHD / radeonsi fixes mentioned above as I am running purely on the Nvidia discrete card.

[CeleiteCode]

I haven't tested all of them yet, but for me:

• --use-gl=desktop: works
• --enable-hardware-overlays="": does not work
• --disable-accelerated-video-decode: works
• Disable hardware acceleration (settings): works

System information:
Browser: Brave 1.85.118 (Chromium: 143.0.7499.169)

nvidia-smi:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.119.02             Driver Version: 580.119.02     CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 ...    Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   41C    P8             14W /   30W |      22MiB /   6144MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A            2198      G   ...per-user/celeite/bin/Hyprland          2MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Hybrid setup with:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA106M [GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q] (rev a1)
07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cezanne [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series] (rev c5)

[scossar]

Hybrid setup

I'm curious about how Omarchy is handling hybrid setups. That seems to be the cause of the issue for a few people here.

When you visit chrome://gpu/ (it redirects to brave://gpu/ on Brave), what do you see in the GL_RENDERER entry? Is it showing that Chrome/Brave is using Radeon or NVIDIA?

In either ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf or ~/.config/hypr/envs.conf, is LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME set to nvidia? Another way of checking this is from the terminal with echo $LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME

[CeleiteCode]

Relevant to mention: I'm not on Omarchy. I'm on NixOS with my own setup.
chrome://gpu/ shows it using AMD

I have

"LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME, nvidia"
"__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME, nvidia"
"NVD_BACKEND, direct"

[scossar]

chrome://gpu/ shows it using AMD

I'm guessing this is the root of the problem: "LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME, nvidia"

It should be set to whatever the AMD driver is. Possibly radeonsi if that's installed on your system.

[CeleiteCode]

Just found more info on wiki pages.
Hyprland mentions:

VA-API hardware video acceleration

install nvidia-vaapi-driver
set env = NVD_BACKEND,direct

There is also experimental support for Chromium, however there has not been much success.

The nvidia-vaapi-driver project page states:

Chrome is currently unsupported, and will not function.

The Omarchy script you mentioned above sets the same variables.

Setting LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME, radeonsi works as you've mentioned.

[jelenv]

I think it's better to set radeonsi only for the browser process or apps which you want to run the HW acceleration on AMD iGPU on hybrid setups, not for the whole environment.
See my answer above. Correct me if I am wrong.

[spryffee]

@scossar I have hybrid too

~ ❯ lspci | grep -E "VGA|3D|Display"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation CometLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics] (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU117M [GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile] (rev a1)

I tried your solution. For me, changing env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,nvidia to env = LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME,iHD makes it significantly worse.

After last update I have performance degradation for entire system, not just for playing videos.

p.s. I also tried all other solutions in this thread, nothing helps.

[scossar]

Is iHD (the name the system uses for the intel-media-driver) installed on your system? You can check by running:

ls /usr/lib/dri/*_drv_video.so

The entry looks like this?

.rwxr-xr-x   39M root 28 Sep  2025   /usr/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so

My understanding is that with the intel GPU you need intel-media-driver along with Mesa (which should already be installed) for hardware accelerated video. I'm far from an expert on this. I only starting looking at it because my system was so messed up.

The only change I've made from default Omarchy for my system is install intel-media-driver and change the LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME env variable.

[spryffee]

yes, it is /usr/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so

[RodriMora]

--disable-accelerated-video-decode solved the problems for me for brave. I don't use chromium.

My problems were some videos not playing, specially webm files. They would just play a plain green and glitchy image.
Also random freezes of the browser with the "terminate/wait" popup

Specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7435HS (no igpu on this one)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Max-Q / Mobile [Discrete]
Omarchy 3.3.3
Nvidia drivers: 590.48.01
Brave: 1.85.120 Chromium: 143.0.7499.192 (Official Build) (64-bit)

[RodriMora]

replying to myself, it fixed the webm video playback, but freezing and hanging of the browser still happens

[Mustafa-Arghandiwal]

After the update, I removed all these flags that I've had added
--use-gl=desktop
--ozone-platform=x11
--disable-gpu-compositing
--disable-accelerated-video-decode
...
and now both chromium and brave are playing videos without any issues, at least for now.

[tmeskuti]

What update are you referring to?

[Mustafa-Arghandiwal]

3.3.3

[Priyansh4444]

This worked for me on helium but not omarchy-chromium, I believe!

[data-davey]

Partial fix

chromium --user-data-dir=/tmp/some_new --use-gl=desktop
[11790:11790:0126/092056.701843:ERROR:ui/gl/init/gl_factory.cc:111] Requested GL implementation (gl=none,angle=none) not found in allowed implementations: [(gl=egl-angle,angle=opengl),(gl=egl-angle,angle=opengles),(gl=egl-angle,angle=vulkan),(gl=egl-angle,angle=swiftshader)].
[11790:11790:0126/092056.702362:ERROR:components/viz/service/main/viz_main_impl.cc:189] Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization

Discrete GPU = NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER

Error with chromium --user-data-dir=/tmp/some_new:
ERR: ImageEGL.cpp:112 (operator()): eglCreateImage failed with 0x00003009
[11334:11334:0126/091946.627516:ERROR:ui/gl/scoped_egl_image.cc:23] Failed to create EGLImage: EGL_SUCCESS
[11334:11334:0126/091946.627543:ERROR:ui/ozone/common/native_pixmap_egl_binding.cc:76] Unable to initialize binding from pixmap
[11334:11334:0126/091946.627578:ERROR:gpu/command_buffer/service/shared_image/ozone_image_backing.cc:316] OzoneImageBacking::ProduceSkiaGanesh failed to create GL representation
[11334:11334:0126/091946.627604:ERROR:gpu/command_buffer/service/shared_image/shared_image_manager.cc:404] SharedImageManager::ProduceSkia: Trying to produce a Skia representation from an incompatible backing: OzoneImageBacking