Answer by changtung for unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally (Driver info: chromedriver=2.9

I had simillar issue with maven tests on x86 linux which i was using in terminal. I was logging in to linux by ssh. I started my java selenium tests by

mvn -DargLine="-Dbaseurl=http://http://127.0.0.1:8080/web/" install

Excepting my app, after running these tests I received error in logs:

unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally

I was running these tests as root user. Before this error i received that ChromeDriver is nor present. I moved forward with this by installing ChromeDriver binary and adding it to PATH. But then i had to install google-chrome browser - ChromeDriver alone isn't enough to run tests. So the mistake is problem maybe with screen buffer in terminal window, but You can install Xvfb which is virtual screen buffer. What is important, that you should run your tests not as root, because you may receive another Chrome Browser error. So no as root i run:

export DISPLAY=:99Xvfb :99 -ac -screen 0 1280x1024x24 &

What is important here, that in my case the number related to DISPLAY ought to be same as Xvfb :NN parameter. 99 in that case. I had another problem because i ran Xvfb with another DISPLAY value and I wanted it to stop. In order to restart Xvfb:

ps -aux | grep Xvfbkill -9 PIDsudo rm /tmp/.X11-unix/X99

So find a process PID with grep. Kill Xvfb process. And then there is lock in /tmp/.X11-unix/XNN , so delete this lock and you can start server again. If You run not as root, set simillar displays, install google-chrome then with maven you can start selenium tests. My tests went fine with these rules and operations.