WebGL context lost error on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

[RUI LI]

Hi,

I am looking for advice on how to resolve a WebGL context lost error in Chromium browsers within Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 through a virtual machine.

Reproduction steps:

I installed RHEL 9.6 with VMware Workstation Pro. When I installed the Chrome stable version and opened any WebGL-related website, there was a context lost error in the console and the scene could not be rendered. For example, I cannot run any examples on https://webglsamples.org/. Similarly, an application written on top of the Chromium Embedded Framework raises the same error.

Things I have tried:

• I also tried RHEL 9.5 and saw the same issue. I tried Ubuntu 24.04 and did not see the context lost issue, everything works well. This looks like a RHEL-specific issue.
• I tried adding some breakpoints within a very simple WebGL example (i.e., draw a triangle), and it appears the WebGL context lost error occurs after calling the drawArrays function. I don't see the error during the shader compilation or buffer initialization stages.
• I know that starting from version 139, the SwiftShader fallback will be deprecated. However, the issue persists even on an older Chromium version.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[RUI LI]

I have some updates based on my further investigation:

I opened chrome://gpu and saw the following error logs:

GpuProcessHost: The GPU process crashed!
[4324:4324:0715/193543.646088:WARNING:sandbox_policy/linux/sandbox_linux.cc:415]: InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process

After adding the --ignore-gpu-blocklist flag, I can now see that WebGL works and VMware hardware rendering appears in chrome://gpu.

It seems that on RHEL systems, Chromium disables VMware hardware rendering by default, and SwiftShader has some compatibility issues with the system.