Fedora 39 breaks Chromium-based browsers after a Mesa update

I temporarily return to Fedora and am welcomed back by more breakage. The first thing I did after updating and restarting my Fedora laptop was to fire up the Cider app to connect to Apple Music. It immediately croaked with its dying words being Skia shader compilation error. That felt eerily familiar, as I remember facing the same problem on Fedora a few months back.

Skia shader compilation error

The error could be observed while issuing journalctl when opening any chromium-based application, like Microsoft Edge:

Skia shader compilation error

The effect of the error is the evident lack of rendering of components like text and images in the browser. An example is shown below for both the rendered web page and the uBlock Origin extension:

Microsoft Edge on Fedora 39 after a Mesa update.

There is an in-depth thread on the issue on the Chromium bug tracker, so I won’t rehash all the details unnecessarily. However, other GNU/Linux-based distributions have managed to avoid this bug when updating Mesa drivers and libraries, so I wonder why Red Hat has fumbled the ball again. I am sure they’ll find a way to blame Google for it though.

Resolving the issue

Like the last time, deleting the GPUCache directories of any affected application will remedy the issue. Identity applications and flatpaks by issuing a simple find command:

find ~/.config ~/.var -type d -name "GPUCache"

/home/roger/.config/chromium/Default/GPUCache
/home/roger/.config/microsoft-edge/Default/Storage/ext/ihmafllikibpmigkcoadcmckbfhibefp/def/GPUCache
/home/roger/.config/microsoft-edge/Default/GPUCache
/home/roger/.config/VSCodium/GPUCache
/home/roger/.config/Cider/GPUCache
/home/roger/.config/IPFS Desktop/GPUCache
/home/roger/.var/app/com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChromium/config/chromium/Default/GPUCache
/home/roger/.var/app/com.vscodium.codium/config/VSCodium/GPUCache
/home/roger/.var/app/com.spotify.Client/cache/spotify/Browser/GPUCache

After deleting the GPUCache directories, Chromium-based applications work as expected again:

Microsoft Edge on Fedora 39 post a Mesa update fix.

If you need more assistance then please check out Bug 2193335, on Red Hat’s Bugzilla. Anyhow, enough of this nonsense. I’m going back to my MacBook Pro ;-)

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all that jazz. And don’t drink and drive.

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