Whoops, Linux 5.5 Missed Some "Critical" Intel Graphics Driver Patches

[nranger]

There is linux-lts which you can install in parallel to fix things or use it as a fallback. Just saying.

That's exactly what I do, plus adding linux-lts to pacman.conf 's IgnorePkg list when it's in a good state.

[kcrudup]

I'm surprised more of the readership here isn't compiling their own kernels. I have a recent IceLake laptop and pretty much need to run Linus' tip, but everything (save fingerprint and camera) all work just fine.

That being said, when the last merge of drm-next went in last week, I lost the ability to run 3 monitors in my particular setup (1080p HDMI/1920x1200 laptop/4K DP) as it wouldn't "fire up" the 4K display (probably some miscalculation of available bandwidth). I did a "git revert -m1 <drm-next merge commit>" to get things back to normal, and I'm hoping when they finally push the complete drm-next that issue will be fixed (but having tried "drm-tip" at the time it wasn't fixed there, so who knows). (I'd spent about an hour trying to bisect the issue but it was inconclusive.)

[Quetzalcoatlus]

Yeah I have an HD 4000 and Arch 5.5 was hanging the GPU constantly. I figured out after a couple of hard reboots that toggling to tty1 and back to tty0 would get it going again, but it was still so irritating that I checked out 5.3 and built it from source. 5.6 rc1 seems to work fine as well if you're sick of building the wireguard module out of tree.

[Quetzalcoatlus]

Yeah I have an HD 4000 and Arch 5.5 was hanging the GPU constantly. I figured out after a couple of hard reboots that toggling to tty1 and back to tty0 would get it going again, but it was still so irritating that I checked out 5.3 and built it from source. 5.6 rc1 seems to work fine as well if you're sick of building the wireguard module out of tree.

(Unsure if building it is easier than trying to get pacman to downgrade linux, but that's not something I think I'd even even attempt for fear of having to use its dependency override flags and/or breaking everything else. Just don't forget to modprobe configs; zcat /proc/config.gz > .config; make oldconfig and be prepared to wait, that's all new stuff since I last built a kernel is how long it's been, if you don't want the hassle of configuring the build, or have a brand new Threadripper

[Quetzalcoatlus]

Of course you can go the linux-lts route too if you're ok with 4.19 but it's always handy having an updated and built kernel and full tree around anyway if you need to use modules not in the standard builds, and i was going to check out bcachefs anyway..

[NotMine999]

With the recent kernels (>=4.3) the Intel graphics experience ust just a sad joke. GPU hangs are a daily bread and with early 4.3s you couldn't even get the machine to boot. I don't know what they've done to their kernel driver, but it sure jadę a deep scratch on my perception of the Intel graphics being the leading example how to do graphics on Linux.

Graphics hangs doing what? Can you please be more specific. I have not had issues booting Linux using Intel graphics much less ever had issues with video playback at 1080p 60fps driving 2 screens using Intel graphics and Debian 10 and before it was 10.

[NotMine999]

Nope, I run Linux as my primary laptop with Coffeelake and i915 hangs/rcs0 resets and overall lack of driver stability is extremely frustrating. I'm sad to say, but I never had issues like that with graphics driver performance on Windows, and I haven't used Windows in 7 years.

I think you just explained your problems. Trying to run Linux on very recent (or current, can never keep up with Intel's code names for stuff) hardware.

Unless it's something simple like adding PCI IDs, good Linux support for very recent hardware can take 6 months to a year to appear, sometimes longer on "stable" releases if they don't have a program for backporting code needed to support newer hardware. Linux has been that way for decades.

[archsway]

A very similar situation almost happened for Panfrost but the omission was discovered after 5.5-rc6 and the fix merged a couple of days before 5.5 was released.

[kcrudup]

Trying to run Linux on very recent (or current, can never keep up with Intel's code names for stuff) hardware.

Eh, I'm running a CPU (and GPU) even newer than what he's got, and everything *does* work, but you need the bleeding-edge source to get there.

[Buntolo]

With the recent kernels (>=4.3) the Intel graphics experience ust just a sad joke. GPU hangs are a daily bread and with early 4.3s you couldn't even get the machine to boot. I don't know what they've done to their kernel driver, but it sure jadę a deep scratch on my perception of the Intel graphics being the leading example how to do graphics on Linux.

Wasn't intel stuff in general the most Linux-compatible? I'm running archlinux + 5.4 + Intel HD 2500 and I've never had any issue. Same for Xubuntu LTS 18.04.3 + 5.0 + HD 5500: no issues.

This is not to say that there are no issue, everyone's experience is anecdotal, but to say that maybe are related to specific models or workloads.