I am able to reproduce the nvidia failure on Ubuntu 17.10. I suspect hitting the issue depends on the nvidia driver version. I use nvidia-384.
After a bit of debugging it turns out that one of the helper processes of chromium runs: mknod("/dev/nvidiactl", S_IFCHR|0666, makedev(195, 255)) which is not allowed. Its unclear why it is trying to mknod this device because it is already available in the namespace that chromium runs in.