Linux 5.15.101 LTS Released To Fix Broken Intel Graphics At Boot

Yesterday saw emergency hot-fix releases in the Linux 6.2 and 6.1 series for addressing an easy-to-trigger kernel oops when mounting and unmounting external storage. This weekend is proving more volatile with today bringing an emergency hot-fix release for the Linux 5.15 LTS series due to a separate issue.

Linux 5.15.101 LTS is out this Sunday morning with one patch: reverting a patch that landed back in Linux 5.15.99, "drm/i915: Don't use BAR mappings for ring buffers with LLC." That two line patch ended up regressing systems with Intel graphics, at least widespread issues were reported for laptops with Intel integrated graphics.

The broken Intel graphics were quickly spotted on Linux 5.15 LTS based distributions like Alpine Linux and Manjaro Linux. Users began reporting a blank display when trying to boot the prior Linux 5.15 LTS point releases when Intel graphics, with bug reports appearing in the Alpine Linux bug tracker, the kernel mailing list, and the upstream Intel driver bug report over the black/empty screen during boot.

So if you upgraded to the latest Linux 5.15 LTS point release this past week and are now having a blank screen on boot with Intel graphics, go forth and ensure you upgrade to Linux 5.15.101 for the fix or to otherwise bypass this issue.