Red Hat Recommends Disabling The Intel Linux Graphics Driver Over Hardware Flaw

[Delgarde]

RH did not use the word recommend, but used the word mitigation. That is common in the security space where one can mitigate against the vuln until patches/fixes/process can be applied.

Yep, that's a significant difference from "recommend". They're not saying "we think you should do this" — they're saying "this _will_ fix the issue if you're willing to accept the disadvantages".

[starshipeleven]

Does this mean I can't play Crysis on RHEL any longer? If true it's a huge bummer.

Does Intel Graphics even run Crysis? I'm pretty sure they still can't.

[starshipeleven]

Yep, that's a significant difference from "recommend". They're not saying "we think you should do this" — they're saying "this _will_ fix the issue if you're willing to accept the disadvantages".

It's a mitigation, not a fix. Disabling an entire kernel module and losing functionality is NOT a fix unless the whole hardware is malware and must be turned off.

Which in case of Intel it's not THAT far off from the truth anyway.

[timofonic]

Intel sucks. It needs real competition, more than AMD and Chinese-only market CPUs derived from VIA.

[polarathene]

it's not a major problem but you do want to mitigate it then disable i915 for now. Its not a recommendation for normal users.

Not a problem until the mitigation via kernel update enforces it. I'm still curious for other confirmations about increase in watts drawn for Gen9+, I'll take the local vulnerability over losing a notable hit on battery life..

[intelfx]

Not a problem until the mitigation via kernel update enforces it. I'm still curious for other confirmations about increase in watts drawn for Gen9+, I'll take the local vulnerability over losing a notable hit on battery life..

You're looking at a 1.5x-2x reduction in battery life on any recent mobile Intel platform. They really require very tight integration/coordination between all available parts of the CPU and the chipset to have any power savings at all.

That said, if you're on Gen9, then kernels 5.3.8 and newer already come with disabled rc6 And nobody is doing anything about it.

[kpedersen]

If these are for the older drivers then in most cases you would already be running in software mode.

For example Blender requires GL 3.x and above. The older GMA drivers only implement OpenGL 2.0. So you would need LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 anyway.

Interestingly I seem to have a more responsive experience when using the software renderer than these older GPUs anyway :/

Possibly the only issue is the limited display resolutions of vesa.

[libv]

Now if only DRM wasn't such a mashed together mess, and there was clear separation between display and the various engines (of which 3d is only one). But that's just how fd.o/drm people do.

[r08z]

Wow Intel sucks big monkey balls...

[polarathene]

You're looking at a 1.5x-2x reduction in battery life on any recent mobile Intel platform. They really require very tight integration/coordination between all available parts of the CPU and the chipset to have any power savings at all.

That said, if you're on Gen9, then kernels 5.3.8 and newer already come with disabled rc6 And nobody is doing anything about it.

Michael tested a Whiskey Lake for Gen9 to see if there was any power regression as a result despite the minimal performance regression for Gen9 graphics, and found no change in power draw, unless he didn't test it right(eg tested on at load rather than idle..)

As for the RC6, how to I verify that? My Comet Lake seems to report RC6 in PowerTop, but perhaps I'm looking at the wrong place, don't know too much about such yet. Not sure that I can test on older kernels either as 4.19 didn't seem to boot from install media(live usb) with such