Ubuntu 25.04 VM on MacOS host: Hardware acceleration not working in the latest versions of Chromium.

[nturatti]

Hi UTM experts,
I am running an Ubuntu 25.04 VM on a MacOS host (M4 chip), by using UTM 4.7.5 (build 118).
Everything was running fine, only a freeze every now and then, until Chromium recently was automatically updated to the version 146.0.7680.80.

Now the hardware acceleration is not working anymore.

Overall the virtual graphic card is working fine, I see that I have hardware acceleration in Firefox, but I absolutely need to use Chromium with hardware acceleration.

Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this issue?

I tried to revert back to a previous version of Chromium, but I am not an expert and it doesn't seem to be an easy way to get a specific version. Switching channels didn't help and I was too dumb/ignorant to use snap revert before uninstalling Chromium or snap refresh --hold to prevent unwanted updates..

I tried to use UTM 5.0.2 beta, but Chromium is not even loading in that VM and it doesn't seem stable at all.

[carsongoodwin32]

I'm able to get your version Chromium to work with hardware acceleration on UTM 5.0.1 Beta using MoltenVK and the ANGLE(Metal) backend with these launch arguments.

chromium --ozone-platform=x11
--use-gl=angle
--use-angle=swiftshader
--enable-features=Vulkan,DefaultANGLEVulkan,VulkanFromANGLE,UseSkiaRenderer

This is almost certainly an issue with OpenGL since the logs mention that it's failing to create an OpenGL instance and then the GPU process crashes. If I use anything other than swiftshader it doesn't let me use Vulkan at all.

[nturatti]

Hi @carsongoodwin32,
Thanks a lot for finding a solution.

It seems indeed an issue with OpenGL.
I was able to downgrade my Chromium via snap to 145.
I still have some error messages in the log, but they don't compromise the hardware acceleration and the system seems stable (I changed by backend renderer to ANGLE(OpenGL).

I will give a try to your solution too.

[carsongoodwin32]

@nturatti Semi related Chromium bug report?
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/497304551

Seems like exactly what I've seen happen, except we're not using Kernel 7.0rc7 or Broadwell graphics stack. Seems like a broader chromium issue at the moment. I'll post a bug report on Chromium for what I've found, but it's probably not something that can be fixed inside of UTM.