Intel Haswell GT1 Graphics Have Been Busted The Past Half-Year On Linux

While Intel is generally well regarded for their Linux development practices especially as it pertains to continuous integration and their test labs for vetting code prior to reaching the mainline Linux kernel to minimize the risk of regressions or other unintended side effects, those running older Haswell GT1 low-end graphics have seen the past several kernel versions going back a half-year yield a GPU hang at boot.

This bug report has been the central focus for initially tracking the issue and then more recently the testing of patches. The problematic behavior is Intel Haswell GT1 graphics commonly seeing a hang at boot and often with graphics corruption/artifacts as soon as the X.org Server starts. Haswell GT1 is the low-end "HD Graphics" hardware of the Haswell series found in the likes of their Celeron/Pentium processors at the time as well as select Xeon SKUs.

There has been a patch to fix the issue and it appears to fix up the situation for everyone who reported it albeit over the past number of weeks it hasn't gone to the mainline kernel or any stable kernels for that matter.

Former Intel Linux graphics driver developer Matt Turner today called out the company on it and the lack of activity in getting this support squared away for those still using these old Intel processors.

@gfxlisa: though I'm no longer at Intel I'm still invested deeply in open source graphics and am a Intel GFX user... and I'm very concerned. Are you aware that for 4 major Linux kernel versions that HSW GT1 has been 100% broken? HSW GT3 was broken for 3 major versions.

— Matt Turner (@mattst88) January 7, 2021

There is hope with renewed attention to this persisting Haswell GT1 issue that the patch that has been available for ~3 months will finally get picked up.

The real kicker that introduced this show-stopping HSW GT1 regression? The Gen7 graphics mitigation for the iGPU Leak vulnerability that was disclosed and then mitigated last year as a nasty Intel graphics vulnerability.