Hi everyone !

I've been using with absolutely no issue (apart from a specific issue with VLC) a Kaby Lake desktop under Neon for about a year (with an Nvidia card).

I thought I would stop wasting my time with games and removed my Nvidia card in order to use the Intel HD 630 built into the processos (Intel G4620).

It seemed to work like a charm : super fast kwin. Maybe even smoother than with my GTX 1050... However quickly I noticed :

(other forum post) 1) that most games are extremely slow : way slower than they are supposed to be even with a much slower Intel HD ... Even in other desktop environments, except when they use Wayland instead of X (though X is generally to be preferred at the moment : more FPS and less input lag)

2) way more serious : SEVERAL times a day, I get a major X crash, which is usually extremely rare (even with the same PC with the Nvidia or with other PCs with other different Intel Graphics). Usually, some UI elements begin to appear unresponsive (task manager, window contents etc). Strange things happen (blinking black screen, difficulty to raiser windows...) for a couple of seconds / a minute and eventually everything hangs (not even possible to kill / restart X).

I figured out Neon, which is based on Ubuntu LTS, doesn't use the same X driver for the Intel Graphics. Neon uses a "xserver-xorg-video-intel-native-modesetting" driver which is about 6 months more recent than the xserver-xorg-video-intel-hwe (Ubuntu). I heard somewhere it's supposed to behave better and to be faster. I switched to this older version. No difference in terms of performance but I have to keep it running a couple of more hours to make sure it's most stable, but no problem yet.

My question is :
- should Neon really use by default this xserver-xorg-video-intel-native-modesetting driver" ?
- do other ppl crash with it ? Kabby Lake is very common. If other distros don't use this driver or use Wayland, that might explain why nobody complained about it yet ?

More info :
- I made a clean install to double check, I applied the intel microcode fixes, etc. to no avail. The only difference is the use of the Intel HD 630 instead of the Nvidia card.

I really wish other ppl using Intel HD 630 could tell me if it's stable. As it has performance issues, I guess it might also have stability issues, but I couldn't find any relevant bugreport anywhere.

Cheers !

I decided to open this bugreport as I think the issue is pretty serious :
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388712

cheers

the package xserver-xorg-video-intel-native-modesetting is a "Dummy package to force native modesetting for xorg on intel Conflicts with xserver-xorg-video-intel to force native modesetting, which works vastly better on Intel GPUs from 2007 onwards. If you experience graphics problems installing xserver-xorg-video-intel will install the actual xorg driver for Intel GPUs and might improve results.”

it is not a separate driver, but a configuration change to force native modesetting on newer Intel gpus.

Hi ! I think it's not the case anymore. Indeed, installing this package REMOVES any other intel driver installed and also the indicated version number is not the same (GIT from September instead of GIT from March ; well, according to what I see in Synaptic).

Thx for the reply ! In any case, it does trigger a massive stability issue on my machine.

Actually I have been looking at things incorrectly - I am going to bet that you are actually using the i915 driver, which is on included with the kernel, NOT the xserver-xorg-video-intel package. For example, in my case:

Code: Select all

gus@gus-HP-Compaq-Elite-8300-SFF:~$ lsmod | grep video
video                  40960  1 i915

The xserver-xorg-video-intel is a set of legacy drivers. (K)ubuntu, for example does not have a xserver-xorg-video-intel-native-modesetting package at all, and it also does NOT have xserver-xorg-video-intel installed by default, either. Neon's dummy package is forcing the use of the i915 driver for some of those older devices that might still be able to use the legacy driver.

I will bet that no matter which xserver-xorg-intel* package you install, your gpu is still using the i915 driver.

As we are using systems based on 16.04, it would be worth looking at Ubuntu's HWE to provide newer kernels, xorg, and drivers that may provide better support for your hardware, which was released after 16.04 was.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack
As Neon is based on 16.04.0, this is not enabled by default as it is in later point releases of *buntu.

claydoh wrote:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack
As Neon is based on 16.04.0, this is not enabled by default as it is in later point releases of *buntu.

That's not true. Neon is based on ubuntu xenial-updates, so the neon ISO is always ahead of any ubuntu point release and as such comes with HWE by default. As with ubuntu 16.04.0, neon installations done before HWE, were not force-migrated to HWE though. i.e. a neon installed before February 2017 has the LTS kernel, all new installations have the HWE kernel.

apachelogger wrote:

claydoh wrote:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack
As Neon is based on 16.04.0, this is not enabled by default as it is in later point releases of *buntu.

That's not true. Neon is based on ubuntu xenial-updates, so the neon ISO is always ahead of any ubuntu point release and as such comes with HWE by default. As with ubuntu 16.04.0, neon installations done before HWE, were not force-migrated to HWE though. i.e. a neon installed before February 2017 has the LTS kernel, all new installations have the HWE kernel.

I stand corrected, sorry for that. My systems are all with installs older than I remember

Thanks a lot for your replies !

Yes indeed, you're right the dummy package is indeed a dummy package. I was confused by the fact the "version number" under Synaptic referred to a GIT version that was more recent than the version of the xorg-intel-hwe driver.

By default, on new installs, this dummy, native modesetting driver is indeed selected. And this is the one that triggers massive instability on my Kaby Lake Intel HD 630.

When installing the xorg-intel-xxx from synaptic, lsmod says the i915 driver is also being used. In synaptic, in the installed files list, I can read that there are some libs being installed though, so maybe it's not the same driver version after all ?

If I understand correctly, the i915 driver is built into the kernel. So changing the kernel version should make a difference ? I tried to install linux 4.10 and 4.13 and both crash the same way.

What should I do to help debug this issue ? This is massive random instability that can happen very quickly of after several hours and occurs here on recent hardware with the driver selected by default. My initial bugreport is very badly written apparently. What you're telling me is that all might be due to the use of native modesetting. I should not trust the versions numbers indicated in the package managers ? (referring to different git versions)

Thanks a lot

To sum up : I don't know if the huge instability is due to mode-setting or due to different drivers / versions. Is mode-setting a kind of more direct access to the GPU not requiring an X driver ?

OK so, crashed kept happening, recently, even when not using the -modesetting package. It seems related to the fact Ubuntu LTS changed its kernel version for the Meltdown fix (no more 4.10 kernel apparently ! 4.13 only). Maybe modesetting is always used now.

I haven't tried to manually disable modesetting yet, and haven't evaluated the stability under Wayland (due to a lack of time). So I put back an Nvidia card temporarily (kwin is much less smooth with the Nvidia card & proprietary drivers, unfortunately).

ALSO, my wife also has a Kaby Lake PC, but this is a laptop with an Intel HD 520. The stability issue never occured on this machine, using the very same software combination !