Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake Graphics Driver Issues

I was wondering if anyone could help point me in the right direction, I'm having problems with the Intel drivers on Debian as I'm trying to do some transcoding within Docker. But before I even get to Docker, I'm having issues.

vainfo was trying to open Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_drv_video.so, which I believe is the pre 8th Gen drivers. So I ran export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD and installed the following driver intel-media-va-driver-non-free.

When I look in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri I find the driver iHD_drv_video.so, but running vainfo keeps showing the following though.

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set in the environment.
error: can't connect to X server!
libva info: VA-API version 1.4.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: User requested driver 'iHD'
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_4
libva error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so init failed
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 1
vaInitialize failed with error code 1 (operation failed),exit

If anyone could be of assistance, it would be very helpful.

Which flavor of Debian are you running? Sid has the proper drivers, and they work for me. I have iHD_drv_video.so. I'm not sure if the kernel and firmware in Buster backports have the iHD driver, never bothered to look. Vanilla Buster almost certainly won't.

Originally Posted by sgosnell Which flavor of Debian are you running? Sid has the proper drivers, and they work for me. I have iHD_drv_video.so. I'm not sure if the kernel and firmware in Buster backports have the iHD driver, never bothered to look. Vanilla Buster almost certainly won't.

Hi, firstly thanks for replying! I'm running plain old Debian 10. I'm relatively new to Linux for home use, I use RHEL for work but never had to deal with graphics drivers most of my stuff is NGINX/MariaDB. So I have never had to build/compile packages or look through backports, etc so please excuse my ignorance.

Could you please point me in the direction I need to look for the correct information? I'm guessing you are talking about these drivers https://packages.debian.org/sid/intel-media-va-driver, it doesn't specifically mention Comet Lake? I'm assuming just like backports and non-free you add SID to sources.list?


Some more details of playing around last night.

I added backports to my sources.list, but couldn't install any of the drivers I was trying to install. So I did a search on packages.debian.org, but only two results appeared for anything with Intel in the name.

Package firmware-intel-sound

    buster-backports (kernel): Binary firmware for Intel sound DSPs [non-free]
    20200918-1~bpo10+1: all

Package firmware-intelwimax

    buster-backports (kernel): Binary firmware for Intel WiMAX Connection [non-free]
    20200918-1~bpo10+1: all

I also came across a post where someone mentioned you couldn't use the old i965 drivers as they weren't compatible with Buster, and I had to compile it from the following link https://github.com/intel/media-driver. I attempted to do this a few times, but CMAKE seems to fail on Step 6 of the build for various reasons.

The drivers you need are firmware-linux, firmware-linux-nonfree, and firmware-misc-nonfree, plus probably intel-microcode and amd64-microcode. You might not need all of them, I'm not certain, but they won't hurt AFAICT. I installed them on my 10th-gen system. You need the newest kernel in the backports repo, and I'm not sure which one that is now, since I moved to Sid immediately after getting things working. I have an older backup box running Stable, but I've been using Sid for years.

It's a simple calculation.

Compare
A: age of distro release, i.e. when did the release first come out. In the case of 10/buster this is July 6th, 2019
B: age of hardware (in this case specifically the CPU/GPU), i.e. when did it first come on the market

A needs to be significantly (a year for Debian, half a year for "faster" distros) later/larger than B.

Distros that use a rolling model are usually closer to real time, but never 100%. Linux always lags behind hardware coming on the market.

True, but the necessary drivers are available through backports. Intel tends to get drivers for its hardware into the kernel rather quickly. The vanilla Buster kernel is rather old, but newer is available via the backports. The reason Debian Stable is so named is that once it's released, it doesn't change, except for security updates. Backports allow for running it on newer hardware, Unstable allows running on almost any hardware. I mostly run Sid (Unstable) but I have a backup computer with Stable on it, just in case.

Originally Posted by sgosnell The drivers you need are firmware-linux, firmware-linux-nonfree, and firmware-misc-nonfree, plus probably intel-microcode and amd64-microcode.

Thanks for those suggestions, but looks like I'm already running all of these. See results;

firmware-linux is already the newest version (20200918-1~bpo10+1).
firmware-linux-nonfree is already the newest version (20200918-1~bpo10+1).
firmware-misc-nonfree is already the newest version (20200918-1~bpo10+1).
intel-microcode is already the newest version (3.20200616.1~deb10u1).
amd64-microcode is already the newest version (3.20181128.1).

A web search turned up this site: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/202...pi-on-wayland/
which has this:

Intel graphics card There are two drivers for Intel cards, libva-intel-driver (provides i965_drv_video.so) and libva-intel-hybrid-driver (iHD_drv_video.so). Firefox works with libva-intel-driver only, intel-media-driver is broken due to sandboxing issues (Bug 1619585). I strongly recommend to avoid it all cost and don’t disable media sandbox for it.

You might try installing libva-intel-driver and see if that works. There are lots of hits for the iHD driver not working, but most of the ones I saw are rather old. The one I linked is recent.

That package is not available in Debian, and my system has all the libva packages that seem pertinent installed by default. Vainfo gives the following:

:/$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.9.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_9
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.9 (libva 2.8.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel iHD driver for Intel(R) Gen Graphics - 20.3.0 ()
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints

followed by a long set of entrypoints. You might try reinstalling the iHD driver and see if that helps. Note that my VA-API version is newer than yours, 1.9 vs 1.4. Again, I'm running Sid.

Also consider backports as per post #6!

In case it's not obvious from the replies above - you will most likely need a newer 5.x kernel and associated firmware.

Comet lake firmware is present in firmware-misc-nonfree from backports.