A Bug In The Intel Linux Graphics Driver Is Causing KDE's Plasma 5 To Crash

A bug affecting the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver appears to be responsible for many reports of KDE's Plasma 5 being unstable or causing crashes.

A warning was issued today about a "serious bug in the Intel graphics stack." It turns out that users of the latest Intel Linux graphics stack are running into issues with KDE's Plasma 5 desktop thinking it's "buggy or not ready" while the root cause of "massive amount of crashes for users of Plasma" appears to be the Intel Linux driver. Reportedly Kodi, MPV, and crashes in other OpenGL applications can also occur.

A back trace on the crashes originate within Intel's Mesa driver going back several months, but the apparent workaround is simply disabling Intel's SNA acceleration architecture and instead reverting to the UXA 2D acceleration method as used by default on the xf86-video-intel DDX prior to the 3.0 development series. While using UXA is an apparent fix, in general Intel Linux users find SNA to deliver much better performance than UXA.

The mailing list announcement of this warning about Intel graphics troubles with Plasma 5 was issued today on the KDE distribution packagers list.