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I have an issue on my Dell XPS 13 9343 laptop. I have used 14.04 15.04 and 15.10 on this machine and each one has been a fresh install (deleted the partition and made a new one of a slightly different size).

Sometimes it will work perfectly for a month, other times like today I have crashed 5 times. Each time I am doing something in Chrome, minimizing it, open a link, opening an incognito window, closing the developer tools etc.

It is not a full crash, the cursor still moves, however I cannot access the terminal 'ctrl+alt+F1', doing so removes the cursor and I cannot get it back. It feels like Chrome is making X or lightdm fall over in some way, though I may be wrong.

Since I have to hold the power button to power off and on again I lose an session debugging I might have had.

How can I debug this seemingly random Chrome crash?

  • What files should I be checking?
  • Any specific errors to look out for?
  • Anything I should run in the background to help capture more information?
  • Clearing config files doe not help
  • Reinstalling Chrome does not help
  • I just need to know where to get started on this, I feel lost right now!

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I would personally start by running chrome in the foreground with the debug option from a terminal window and tee-ing the output to a file. That way when it does crash you'll have a complete log that ends presumably with information related to the crash.

There are a zillion chrome command-line options but I would start with ones like --enable-logging

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  • This is useful, but I've spent the last 20 minutes opening hundreds of tabs, clicking on links, closing them, reopening them, opening the dev tools window over and over and over and nothing, no crash. Since this is so very random I was hoping to be able to look through exisiting logs to find the issue.
    – Noki
    May 5, 2016 at 16:32
  • Thanks for the suggestion though, I guess I'll just have to run chrome like this every day and use it as normal until this happens again.
    – Noki
    May 5, 2016 at 16:34
  • Glad I could help! Maybe you're having an observer effect - by looking for the problem you're preventing it from happening!
    – tamale
    May 5, 2016 at 22:32
  • So I finally got it to crash while running the debug, but unfortunately nothing was output that wasn't put into the log during normal operation. Only content after it crashed were 5 lines of 'Vector smash protection is enabled.'
    – Noki
    May 17, 2016 at 16:00
  • Interesting error. That message seems to pop up in a lot of unrelated spaces. I'm curious if you've tried Chromium instead of Chrome and had the same problems.
    – tamale
    May 17, 2016 at 16:07

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