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

[skeevy420]

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.)

We do. No one really wants to be accused of humble bragging. I have older, well supported hardware so I don't have much of a need to scour drm-next, amd-staging, and whatnot these days.

At a minimum I use the NixOS patches to revert the GPL exports and add Graysky's -march patches. If you're gonna compile your own and you use ZoL encryption, those two are mandated. From there, random schedulers (pds, bmq, muqss,etc), timer speeds, and other stuff to see what makes it feel better.

[kcrudup]

I have older, well supported hardware

... which is great for you, as you're able to boot from whatever distro's kernel out of the box, but it's a shame to see some of the posters here running on newer tin suffering with issues I know have been fixed but haven't made it into distro kernels yet.

[skeevy420]

... which is great for you, as you're able to boot from whatever distro's kernel out of the box, but it's a shame to see some of the posters here running on newer tin suffering with issues I know have been fixed but haven't made it into distro kernels yet.

I agree. It especially sucks when you know the fix for something is up stream but the user is too new and green to apply the fixes themselves.

For some related and funny reading, checkout the Steam Linux bug tracker. So many issues, especially from Intel and AMD GPU users, are from Ubuntu LTS where the fix is "simply" use Tumbleweed, Manjaro, Fedora, or a newer Ubuntu release because everything was fixed either in the kernel or Xorg over a year ago.

[arcivanov]

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.

The reason that "everything does work" is most likely because you don't actually use most of your video card. Try turning on DRI3, SNA etc + running chromium with VAAPI and HW acceleration for everything turned on and use 2 x 4k + 1080p laptop monitors through TB3 hub.

Things you discover running in that configuration are on the likes of these: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1773707

And if you're about to say, well, just turn off all of the optimizations - no, I can't, at these resolutions without hardware acceleration CPU is 100%, windows resize visibly slow, battery drains in an hour and even 1080p videos expanded to the full screen are unplayable.

[kcrudup]

running chromium with VAAPI and HW acceleration for everything turned on and use 2 x 4k + 1080p laptop monitors through TB3 hub.

"Check" on the first part, and I have 1080p and 4K running thru my TB3 hub (along with 1920x1200 on the laptop's screen at the same time).

(ETA: I had to suffer thru "GPU HANG"s on CoffeeLake GPUs in early September the last time the Intel guys merged their drm-next into Linus' tip, and had to carve that merge out manually (which is apparently beginning to be par for the course) as I'd filed multiple bugs on their bugzilla and waited for each push from them to maybe be the one that actually fixed things, for two months- so I'm not exactly on the "Intel Graphics" bandwagon either.)

[slacka]

This is the main downside from being on something like Arch.

And while Manjaro is supposed to address issues like this, in the year+ I used it as my daily driver, I found it to only exasperate this type of problem. I'd bet money that Manjaro gets 5.5.4 two weeks after Arch, making their users wait to address this critical issue.

I have hardware affected and my machine locked up while playing a webgl demo I saw over at HN. It sucks, but Arch is still the best compromises for those of us that don't require 100% stability and want to play with the latest toys.

That I know of, no rolling distro has the massive QA resources that would be required to truly stabilize a rolling distro. Hence, Ubuntu LTS at work and Arch at home.

[kcrudup]

... my machine locked up while playing a webgl demo I saw over at HN.

Do you have a URL? I'd like to try it out.

I like this one: https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html

[Guest]

I faced problems with AMD GPU on my R9 390 (here we go again!). Compiled Linux 5.6-git and it seems to work fine there, so I'll have to stick with that until stable release.

[starshipeleven]

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

if you have too new hardware it is not a good choice, just saying.

[skeevy420]

I faced problems with AMD GPU on my R9 390 (here we go again!). Compiled Linux 5.6-git and it seems to work fine there, so I'll have to stick with that until stable release.

Anecdotally, over the years I've seen more random negative posts about the R9 280/285/290 and their 3xx counterparts than any other generation of AMD GPUs.

For me it has been kind of funny because my cheapo R7 260x was a rockstar on Linux and the more expensive ones weren't and I couldn't help but just feel bad for people who spent $300+ on a GPU that wasn't, and still might not be, very reliable or performing up to its potential.

In fact, all the posts like yours made me hold off on upgrading until the 5xx Polaris cards came out. By the time the 5xx Polaris cards were released most major Polaris bugs were squashed and the 4xx cards were getting stellar reviews based on random Phoronix posts so it just made sense to go with the rehashed generation.

Current posts are making me glad I'm kind of broke and unable to buy a Navi. I'd be screwed needing kernels too new to compile ZFS to use my GPU to play my games stored on a Zpool