Linux Takes Another Shot At Fixing Visual Glitches & GPU Hangs For Intel Sandy Bridge

Intel Sandy Bridge processors launched 12 years ago this month and if you still are relying on these 32nm CPUs, it's really time to consider an upgrade for not only the performance but also security and power efficiency reasons. But if you are content with still churning away on a Sandy Bridge desktop under Linux, picked up for upstream and marked for back-porting is another attempt at dealing with visual glitches and GPU hangs that have been affecting some users with the integrated graphics.

Sent out for picking up as part of this week's Linux 6.2 DRM fixes and to then back-port to the stable supported kernel series is re-disabling the RC6p deep sleep power state for Sandy Bridge.

Sandy Bridge integrated graphics do not properly support RC6p power-savings and with the i915 kernel driver currently enabling it, it's been causing glitching and hangs for some Linux users.

Open-source Linux driver support for Sandy Bridge started out rough on Linux but improved well over time.

Way back in 2012 Intel originally disabled RC6p for Sandy Bridge when they realized it was causing problems and this would be the easiest workaround. But in years since the RC6p status for Sandy Bridge was mistakenly/optimistically re-enabled.

Now in 2023, the Intel kernel graphics driver is re-disabling RC6p for Sandy Bridge. In turn hopefully taking care of visual glitches and GPU hangs that have come up for those using these 12 year old processors on Linux.

Intel doesn't focus much on their very old graphics hardware generations, but this ends up being just a one-liner fix to disable RC6p. It's been sent in to Linux 6.2 Git via DRM fixes and over the coming days should be back-ported to the currently supported stable Linux kernel series.