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

[Milian Wolff]

On Samstag, 18. November 2017 15:34:16 CET Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> 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

I've also recently come across this. According to [1] the performance is 
supposedly much worse. Is this still true for more recent mesa/kernel 
versions? 

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-DDX-May-Tests

Thanks, I'll have to try this out

-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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