Intel Skylake Multi-Screen Issues On Linux Still Happening

[direx]

I'm confused about why Phoronix readers think Intel doesn't care about the Intel Linux GPU drivers. Have they just been ignoring the hundreds of articles about Intel GPU driver work? Intel's open source Linux GPU driver is the best one ever IMO - nothing comes close (among open source drivers). Nothing. They offered video encoding years before NVIDIA.

If you think that Intel makes the best GPU drivers for Linux then you have certainly never ever used a Skylake system with multiple screens. As the article points out, multi-screen support has been completely broken on Skylake since the release of the platform. There are freezes, GPU lockups and flickering issues, some of them are even confirmed by Intel people on the bug tracker, and nothing has happened so far.

Kernel 4.8-rc4 will get some fixes, apparently sent in by a RedHat employee, but they still do not resolve all of multi-screen issues. Let's hope it's a start, though.

I don't care about the latest OpenGL version being supported (or anything like that), I just need to get work done on my computer. And AMD and even NVIDIA GPUs are both doing a better job at this right now. Even on drm-intel-nightly Skylake is still a pain in the butt for dual-screen users.

[Guest]

Well, I don't use multiple screens right now, so that's why I don't see problems. But,this is still specific to Intel Skylake (which I agree should be supported properly) - overall in my experience, Intel GPU opensource drivers are the most stable, performant open source drivers I've used. Even now I'm running Linux 4.8rc2 and no problems so far.

[Hi-Angel]

Yeah, specific to Skylake, PowerVR, Bay Trail… In whose gravitational field those things are flying? It's Intel.

[andreano]

Why would they bother with proper multimonitor support, when they can run OpenGL 4.5 programs at 1 fps? Priorities!

Say that again when trying to connect a projector in front of an audience. I found out the hard way that Nvidia's blob was no good at this, unlike Nouveau.

[alien]

I have a dated Haswell Laptop, and even there I see issues pretty much on a daily basis, since I am intensely using mult-screen setups.

I use this machine for work, the hardware can't play any recent titles anyway, nor there are many available on Linux, so I couldn't care less about their recent 100% OpenGL 4.5 coverage in Mesa.

I really need this system to be usable for my sysadmin work, where I need to use it with lots of multi-screen setups: one big external screen at home, and two different dual-big-screen setups at work, at different desks, in addition to random projectors.

Previously I had some occasional GPU hangs whenever changing from my home dual-screen setup to the ones I use at work and the other way round, but those seem to be mostly fixed recently. I still see some oopses in the kernel log, but the machine is mostly usable now, at least it doesn't hang anymore.

Then there was the annoying laptop screen flickering, introduced on 4.6 and luckily fixed in 4.7, which forced me to update my Ubuntu kernel to 4.7.

Recently I got a new screen which I need to use in a MST daisy-chained DisplayPort setup, otherwise the second screen's resolution will be too small. Now the monitors will take turns in turning black for a second or so one at a time, every now and then and I'm still trying to fix a solution for this one.

Maybe it's about time the Intel Linux GPU driver engineers should stop investing in gaming support, where their hardware sucks anyway, and start using their own hardware for actual work, with multiple external screens with different configurations.

[duby229]

Well, I don't use multiple screens right now, so that's why I don't see problems. But,this is still specific to Intel Skylake (which I agree should be supported properly) - overall in my experience, Intel GPU opensource drivers are the most stable, performant open source drivers I've used. Even now I'm running Linux 4.8rc2 and no problems so far.

Almost everyone has the exact opposite experience, Intel's drivers are definitely the most unstable graphics drivers in common use. (Well, AMD's Catalyst drivers are definitely even more unstable, but there are waaaay more people using Intel's drivers though.)

[johnsmithsen]

Do they have anything to do with copy protection?

[GrayShade]

Do they have anything to do with copy protection?

No, see my reply here.