Problems with kernel 3.10 and intel graphics card

dederon · 11-16-2013, 04:41 AM

hello,

yesterday i put my 14.1 box under heavy stress by playing a resource hungry game. several times the machine would hang for some seconds and one time the system would come to a halt, which forced me to reboot.

syslog reveals following:

Nov 15 12:10:22 fiete kernel: [ 3634.517367] [drm:i915_hangcheck_hung] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung

google spit out a lot of topics for this issue, for example:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54226

This seems to be a kernel problem with intel graphics cards.

i dont expect anyone here to fix this issue, but i just wanted to let you know about this and i want to ask what i can do about this. the only (workaround) solution i can think of is to install a 14.0 kernel package on my 14.1 system. but i dont like workarounds.

any idea?

ReaperX7 · 11-16-2013, 05:26 AM

Because Intel uses the open source DRI drivers by default, usually problems arise from not having the latest drivers.

You usually can remedy this by updating to the lastest packages for the following:

Linux-kernel
libdrm
xf86-video-intel
libmesa

Sometimes it helps but not always.

dederon · 11-16-2013, 07:41 AM

thanks for your answer.

by "installing the latest driver/kernel" i guess you are talking about installing this packages by hand (/usr/local/src) instead of using the slackware packages?

jon lee · 11-16-2013, 10:23 AM

Just as a note, I believe that compiling the intel driver (xf86-video-intel) with clang results in performance increases. I haven't benchmarked it, but I noticed that the projectM visualizations seem to run much better.

It's easy to do this. Simply run:
export CC=clang
export CXX=clang
export CFLAGS="-std=gnu89 -g"

before running ./configure

mlslk31 · 11-16-2013, 01:46 PM

I don't know your chipset, but it might help to enable SNA acceleration in Xorg. You can do it as an option in Xorg.conf, or you can compile the behavior into the server. Maybe `man 4 intel` would provide more information. I hadn't done the latter action in a while, but the flags I used were something like --disable-uxa --enable-sna.

The hung/stuck GPU part almost always has to do with hardware acceleration. IOW, it could be due to bad 2D hardware acceleration, but OpenGL stuff can trigger this as well.

There's no guarantee that a newer kernel would help matters overall. 3.12 looks promising.

Should you become stuck, maybe you could file a bug report with the Intel guys. They're decent people over there, and Chris Wilson is awesome and very highly motivated.

dederon · 11-16-2013, 03:26 PM

hi mlslk31,

lspci -v gives me:

Code:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        Subsystem: Lenovo Device 308c
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 44
        Memory at f7800000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
        Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        I/O ports at f000 [size=64]
        Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
        Capabilities: [90] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
        Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [a4] PCI Advanced Features
        Kernel driver in use: i915
        Kernel modules: i915

by checking the xorg log file i can tell you that uxa is used here:

Code:

[   295.047] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] Setup complete
[   295.047] (II) intel(0): [DRI2]   DRI driver: i965
[   295.047] (II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 1408x768 stride 5632, tiled
[   295.049] (II) UXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations:
[   295.049] (II)         solid
[   295.049] (II)         copy
[   295.049] (II)         composite (RENDER acceleration)
[   295.049] (II)         put_image
[   295.049] (II)         get_image

i checked the intel man page and i will give the sna acceleration method a try. the error occures on heavy 3d rendering (minecraft). i dont experience problems anywhere else.

i report back as soon as i have some results.

p.s.: if it wasn't clear by my first post: this failures did not happen in slackware 14.0.

anon231 · 11-16-2013, 05:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mlslk31

There's no guarantee that a newer kernel would help matters overall. 3.12 looks promising.

Yes, Kernel-3.12 works perfectly!

and solves the "black screen" problem.