Open source graphics driver Nouveau is blacklisted by Chrome

Due to repeated bugs in Google, Google decided to blacklist Nouveau directly on Chrome/Chromium 71. Nouveau users will not enable GPU acceleration by default in the browser.

Nouveau is an open source driver for Nvidia graphics cards built by a group of developers to reverse Nvidia’s proprietary Linux drivers through reverse engineering. In August last year, a user submitted a  Chromium bug numbered 876523: on the Ubuntu system, the Chrome tab and the URL bar will be partially or completely covered by multiple black rectangles. These black rectangles will also appear in other places in the browser. When they occur, most of them will be accompanied by an increase in CPU usage and an increase in system temperature. And caused Chrome to take up a lot of memory and even cause the computer to fail. 

After that, many users reported the same problem in the discussion area. Since the bug appeared in WebGL using GPU acceleration, they guessed that the main reason for this problem was the use of the outdated version of Mesa.

The Google development team then responded to this question, saying that because they received too many bug feedback about Nouveau, they did not have enough resources to investigate and fix the error, and their priority was to maintain the security and stability of the browser. It was therefore decided to blacklist Nouveau.

Via: Phoronix