Intel Sandy Bridge On Ubuntu 11.04 Is Still Troubling

After performing a clean installation of Ubuntu 11.04 x86_64 on an Intel Core i5 2500K "Sandy Bridge" system with the Intel H67 motherboard that Intel had sent over in February following the original ASUS H67 problems, the experience was initially fine. With kernel mode-setting (KMS) working fine, Compiz running without fault, and no other visible problems, it initially seemed to be working out just fine in that Canonical may have back-ported some of the Linux 2.6.39 / Mesa 7.11 bug-fixes to their Linux 2.6.38 / Mesa 7.10 packages. The first signs of Intel SNB problems though on Ubuntu 11.04 were evident when some text was occasionally missing from menus on the desktop.

The first OpenGL game test to be run on the stock Ubuntu 11.04 installation for Sandy Bridge was Nexuiz, a popular open-source game that stresses the Mesa stack but is known to work fine with the major open-source graphics drivers. When running Nexuiz via the Phoronix Test Suite, almost immediately we were hitting our first GPU hangs of the Intel SNB driver. This was not a new problem but the initial Sandy Bridge hangs was a semi-common SNB problem originally but then worked out. The SNB hang issue though is not fixed in Ubuntu Natty's package set.