LEAP or Tumbleweed with Skylake i915

Hi all,

I have HP EliteBook 840 G3 with Skylake and Intel Graphics.


00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Sky Lake Integrated Graphics (rev 07)

I works pretty well with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Linux elitebook 4.4.0-64-generic #85-Ubuntu

I tried installing both: LEAP 42.2 and Tumbleweed (end of January snapshot). Both have some sever issues:

  1. LEAP 42.2

While it installs well and boots two things are an issue:
1.1 Brightness buttons not working; minor thing as Gnome brightness control works well (setting acpi_backlight options to ‘’, Linux, etc) did nothing for me.
1.2 More seriously, the whole system occasionally crashed; everything froze (not able to switch event to terminal); always with some graphical redraw operation (as in, never while screen was idle)

Setting AccelMethod or TearFree=true option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf did nothing good; system failed to boot to X. Got stuck with terminal which was flickering, keyboard barely responsive not allowing to debug issue.

  1. Tumbleweed

2.1 Brightness keys work out of the box; woo hoo!
2.1 After few second in X mode, screen starts flickering to he point of getting epilepsy; eventually crashes and everything freezes

Setting AccelMethod or TearFree=true option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf did nothing good; system failed to boot to X. Got stuck with terminal which was flickering, keyboard barely responsive not allowing to debug issue.

So, Skylake, intel i915 on recent openSUSE, anyone had success?

Due to severity of above I had to remove the system and went back to Ubuntu. Can’t debug OS when broken so badly that screen flickers or terminal is not responsive.

Any clues? Tips?

  1. Tumbleweed

2.1 Brightness keys work out of the box; woo hoo!
2.1 After few second in X mode, screen starts flickering to he point of getting epilepsy; eventually crashes and everything freezes

Setting AccelMethod or TearFree=true option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf did nothing good; system failed to boot to X. Got stuck with terminal which was flickering, keyboard barely responsive not allowing to debug issue.

So, Skylake, intel i915 on recent openSUSE, anyone had success?

Due to severity of above I had to remove the system and went back to Ubuntu. Can’t debug OS when broken so badly that screen flickers or terminal is not responsive.

Any clues? Tips?

I don’t have any direct experience with Skylake Intel hardware, but I have observed reports from users (including Ubuntu users) that this is still a real issue. For example

There is a suggestion given there which includes the ‘tear free’ option but also setting the DRI mode which others claim to have helped…

To fix it, create or edit the file at /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf as root with the following:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Intel Graphics”
Driver “intel”
Option “AccelMethod” “sna”
Option “TearFree” “true”
Option “DRI” “3”
EndSection

Thanks!

Saw this post. Tried that setting. In my case it prevents X from starting. Even console terminal is flickering. Can’t log in to fix the file as when screen flickers keystrokes are not captured (difficult to type in password).

You can always boot in ‘failsafe’ mode. Press ‘e’ at the grub, you’ll be presented with grub configuration, scroll down to linux boot parameters and add ‘3’ to the end. hen boot with F10 and you should get a working console. From there you can make/undo the necessary Xorg config changes.

Thanks!

Good tip. Was booting to mode 1, assuming this is recovery/single user mode. The mode 1 was still affected by flickering screen. Should have tried mode 3. That said removal of that file would not make problem go away, only the additional problem created by its addition.

Either way disk is wipe already.

I know there are a number of bug reports around, including this one
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95010
I wonder if upgrading the Xorg stack (by subscribing to the X11: Xorg repo) might be of help here. Hopefully, others with knowledge about this can chime in…

Interesting. I tried setting i915.enable_rc5=0 and i915.enable_rc6=0 with no luck. Didn’t try upgrading Xorg though. Curious if anyone had luck. Installing openSUSE for the 5th time does not sound like fun anymore :wink:

I had understood that the first option didn’t exist and that the second was just a temporary workaround. Upgrading kernel (to stable) and/or Xorg stack would be my first line of attack. Reinstalling shouldn’t be necessary for any of this though.

Regarding the boot parameters, this Archwiki page mentions some info concerning power saving states…
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics#RC6_sleep_modes_.28enable_rc6.29

Isn’t LEAP on stable kernel already? While it didn’t flicker, it did crash system after a while.

Am Fri, 24 Feb 2017 11:36:01 GMT
schrieb jarekrozanski <jarekrozanski@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com>:

> deano_ferrari;2813802 Wrote:
> > I had understood that the first option didn’t exist and that the second
> > was just a temporary workaround. Upgrading kernel (to stable) and/or
> > Xorg stack would be my first line of attack. Reinstalling shouldn’t be
> > necessary for any of this though.
>
> Isn’t LEAP on stable kernel already?

It is, but on a stable 4.4.X kernel. DF meant using a kernel from the
“Kernel:stable” Repo which always holds a very recent stable kernel, 4.10.0 atm.

AK


Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
(R.J. Hanlon)

im on skylake TW, i use modesetting driver, does your system crash without the presence of 20-intel.conf? (when i tried experimenting with intel, system crashed)

I have an Asus Optimus laptop and both Leap 42.2 and Tumbleweed work with Intel 530HD out of the box. Both my Intel & Nvidia cards use modesetting.

I recommend trying the latest Tumbleweed snapshot – you can use the KDE live to mess around w/o installing. Tumbleweed’s Intel package set yields very good performance IMHO.

Try adding:


Section "Device"
  Identifier "Default Device"
  Driver "modesetting"
EndSection

to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d as root user
logout/login

If that works for you, then you can install.

Hope that helps

Can you explain what you mean by “modesetting driver”?

The TW installation (I think it was 4.10.x kernel) without 20-intel.conf modifications, straight after installation does not crash system (at least not right away) but screen flickers. Very badly. Unusable at this point.

Sweet, will test with Live version; tired of reinstalling after crash.