Chromium Causes System Freeze/Hang on Legacy GPUs (ATI Radeon HD 5xxx)

[yaroslavrick]

System details

ATI Radeon HD 5xxx, Omarchy 3.2.0

What's wrong?

On older hardware utilizing legacy ATI/AMD graphics cards (specifically TeraScale 2 architecture using the radeon driver), launching Chromium results in a complete system freeze (hard lock) within a few seconds of startup.

The issue appears to be a conflict between the legacy open-source radeon driver, the Wayland compositor, and Chromium's default hardware acceleration.

Hardware Example

Device: Sony Vaio PCG-61212T (and similar laptops from ~2010)

GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series

Driver: radeon (open source)

Environment: Wayland (Hyprland)

Diagnosis / Root Cause

The legacy radeon driver seems unable to handle modern hardware acceleration requests made by the Chromium engine under Wayland. This leads to a GPU hang that locks up the entire system, requiring a hard reboot.

I confirmed that switching Chromium to software rendering (CPU only) completely resolves the stability issue.

The Fix / Workaround

I successfully resolved the issue by forcing Chromium to disable GPU acceleration via its persistent configuration file. This is a cleaner solution than modifying .desktop files.

Steps to fix:

Create or edit the Chromium flags configuration file:

nano ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf

Add the following line to the file:

--disable-gpu

Save and launch Chromium. The browser now runs stable using software rendering.

Suggested Resolution

Since Omarchy targets a wide range of hardware, please consider:

• Documentation: Adding a note to the Wiki or documentation regarding legacy GPUs (Pre-GCN AMD) and Chromium-based browsers.

• Auto-configuration: Ideally, the installation script could detect if the system is running on the legacy radeon driver and automatically generate ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf with the --disable-gpu flag to prevent immediate system freezing for new users.