If you have the latest MacBook Air and run Chrome as your primary browser, you may have been the victim of numerous kernel panics that require a reboot. Google has now confirmed that a resource leak related to GPU acceleration is triggering the kernel panics, and an update released Thursday afternoon temporarily disables some acceleration features until a full fix is ready.
The problem seems to have first been discovered early last week, according to reports in Apple's support discussion forums. The common thread among users experiencing crashes was the use of Chrome, which seemed to cause a kernel panic related to the drivers for Intel's HD4000 integrated graphics.
It turns out that Chrome's use of GPU acceleration for plug-ins—in particular, Flash—leaked resources. A side effect of that leak, however, is that the drivers for the HD4000 cause a kernel panic, requiring a hard restart to recover.
Google says it has filed a bug report with Apple concerning the driver issue, "since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior," the company told Gizmodo. Chrome developers continue to work on a fix for the resource leak, but in the interim, Google has pushed out an update to Chrome that disables GPU acceleration on Macs with HD4000 graphics until the issue is resolved.
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