Intel HD Graphics and Chromium based Browsers locks up System

 Issue:  When users deploy Chromium based browsers (Edge, Vivaldi, Google Chrome, Opera and Vivaldi) after 15 minutes the system locks up requiring a hard reboot.

Status: CONFIRMED and Resolved with a workaround

Distributions Affected:  Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, OpenSUSE, Linspire, Freespire

Details:

We had a customer contact that when installing various distributions on his ACER Aspire 700 G AIO (All In One)  with 8 gb of RAM / 500 gb HDD when she would launch Chrome and after 15 minutes of browsing the distribution would lock up completely and she would have to do a hard restart.  She tested various other distributions and Chromium based browsers and she had the same issue.  I asked her for photos and a short video and was able to confirm the issue she was having.  While we do not posess that exact system we do have a couple of systems in the lab that match that exact chipset and we were able to replicate the issue on Linspire, Xandros and Freespire.  While working on the issue we tested various other browsers including Firefox, Falkon and Epiphany and those browsers did NOT share the same problem.  We also tested Windows and macOS and were not able to replicate the issue on those operating systems.  We also tested other systems that used different graphic chipsets.  Nvidia and AMD specifically and were not able to replicate the issue on those systems either.  After further testing we determined that the cause of the issue is hardware acceleration in Chromium based browsers and the Intel HD Graphics Chipset.

Workaround or Fix

After trying various distributions ourselves we determined the best course of action is to disable the Hardware Acceleration within Chrome.  After we disabled the Hardware acceleration within the browser itself the issues have seemed to resolve.  On our systems we went several days without having to hard reboot and according to the customer she no longer has this issue.

To disable hardware acceleration open Chrome or Chromium based browsers and click on the menu, enter settings, click on advanced, system and click on the following options in the screenshot, reboot your system.