Has your 2012 MacBook Air been crashing lately? If so, Google Chrome may be to blame. Google has confirmed that they are at fault for a kernel panic issue that is caused by a graphic resource leak within Chrome. A user in the Apple Support Communities has confirmed that this issue was a mix of the new Intel HD 4000 graphics chip set, Google Chrome and Flash.
Google has stated that they are working to “find and fix” the issue. Until then, Google has released an update that temporarily disables GPU acceleration on the Macs affected by this bug. If you would like to read Google’s full statement to Gizmodo on the issue, we have posted it below:
We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.
The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.
While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome’s GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware.
Source: Gizmodo via Apple Insider
Image Credit: marc-flores
