Recommended modesetting driver for Intel graphic cards (was: Re: liquidshell in kdereview)

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Donnerstag, 16. November 2017, 23:24:52 CET schrieb Ingo Klöcker:
> On Dienstag, 7. November 2017 20:55:57 CET Martin Flöser wrote:
> > Am 2017-11-07 20:08, schrieb Martin Koller:
> > >> Are you aware that KWin uses QtQuick for all its UI elements, such as
> > >> Alt+TAB?
> > > 
> > > I have deactivated the compositor since sadly it simply does not work
> > > on my laptop (the intel graphics driver just freezes the whole
> > > machine).
> > 
> > I did not talk about compositor, I talked about QtQuick! Yes, KWin uses
> > QtQuick for rendering it's UI, that is unrelated to compositing.
> > 
> > Now you mention that your intel graphics driver freezes the whole
> > system. I'm using Intel on all my systems and it's the most used driver
> > out there. We get many, many, many bug reports in KWin about issues.
> > Freezing systems has not been in the list for now something like two
> > years.
> > 
> > Given that I am very certain that you have a hardware issue where people
> > can help you with. Intel GPUs are good enough to run the Plasma session
> > without any negative impact.
> > 
> > So let us help you fix your issues that you can enjoy our work without
> > having to spend time on writing your own shell.
> > 
> > First thing: are you using the xorg-modesettings driver? If not: install
> > it, problems solved. Do not (I repeat) do not use the xorg-intel driver.
> > 
> > For kernel I recommend at least version 4.13 as this comes with the
> > atomic modesettings driver stack enabled by default. If you do not have
> > such a kernel version yet I highly recommend to give it a try.
> 
> Martin, thanks a lot for your advice!
> 
> I've suffered from freezes since I updated my openSUSE 13.2 to Tumbleweed
> some time ago (and much longer on my laptop where I've switched to Leap and
> later Tumbleweed much earlier).

Same here, happy to finally see someone with correlated experience. I never 
got any useful hints in the log files, so was close to consider my hardware 
broken. Strange enough all freezes seemed to happen while moving the mouse 
though, which kept the hope alive it was something software-related.

Curious to see if my daily freeze will now be a thing of the past now that I 
changed the driver. Though I am on a 2nd gen 915 device, while all the 
modesettings driver talk I came across on a quick search seemed to be only 
about gen4 and later? No issues seen for one hour so far, hope grows :)

> The switch to the modesetting driver seems
> to have fixed those issues. It took me some time to find out how to enable
> the modesetting driver. To save others the time here's how to do it: Write
> #=====
> Section "Device"
>    Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
>    Driver      "modesetting"
> EndSection
> #=====
> to a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, e.g. 50-device.conf. Make sure that this
> is the only (or at least the first) "Device" section in any of the files in
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/.

Another approach seems to be to uninstall xf86-video-intel, that way the 
seemingly hardcoded driver-auto-match logic will skip forward to the 
modesetting driver:

[    12.125] (==) Matched intel as autoconfigured driver 0
[    12.125] (==) Matched intel as autoconfigured driver 1
[    12.125] (==) Matched modesetting as autoconfigured driver 2
[    12.125] (==) Matched fbdev as autoconfigured driver 3
[    12.125] (==) Matched vesa as autoconfigured driver 4
[    12.125] (==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout
[    12.125] (II) LoadModule: "intel"
[    12.127] (WW) Warning, couldn't open module intel
[    12.127] (II) UnloadModule: "intel"
[    12.127] (II) Unloading intel
[    12.127] (EE) Failed to load module "intel" (module does not exist, 0)
[    12.127] (II) LoadModule: "modesetting"
[    12.127] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/modesetting_drv.so

Cheers
Friedrich