Questions[i915](ubuntu)

I have a Lenovo G710 laptop that ran Ubuntu flawlessly since 15.04.

After updating to 20.04 there were occasional random complete freezes of the desktop. Having updated to 20.10, it now boots okay and the login screen appears normal. The desktop is fine until I try to open any application. The application name appears at the top, and then the desktop completely freezes. In some cases the app icon in the dock becomes pixelated. Sometimes a portion of the desktop flickers to solid black.

The mouse still moves occasionally, and I can CTRL+ALT+F3 to a command line.

Various searches suggest a graphics driver problem. It's an Intel Haswell graphics chip.

I've tried both the Ubuntuand Ubuntu on Wayland options at log in, both give the same results.

What is the best way to approach this?

EDIT:

Output of ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions

drwxrwxr-x 4 carl carl 4096 Oct 26 18:29 gTile@vibou
drwxrwxr-x 3 carl carl 4096 Aug 13 18:55 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x 3 carl carl 4096 Oct 30 14:53 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x 2 carl carl 4096 Sep 10 18:11 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x 3 carl carl 4096 Oct 30 14:53 [email protected]

Output of ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 30 13:53 desktop-icons@csoriano
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 30 13:53 [email protected]
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 30 13:53 [email protected]

Output of free -h

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          5.7Gi       735Mi       4.2Gi        73Mi       855Mi       4.7Gi
Swap:         2.0Gi          0B       2.0Gi

Output of sysctl vm.swappiness

vm.swappiness = 60

EDIT 2 Output of dmesg includes i915 GPU HANG

Last night I've upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 and now Chrome won't start.

10:20:00 /opt/google/chrome$ ./chrome
MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
MESA-LOADER: failed to open i915 (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri:\$${ORIGIN}/dri:/usr/lib/dri)
failed to load driver: i915
MESA-LOADER: failed to open kms_swrast (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri:\$${ORIGIN}/dri:/usr/lib/dri)
failed to load driver: kms_swrast
MESA-LOADER: failed to open swrast (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri:\$${ORIGIN}/dri:/usr/lib/dri)
failed to load swrast driver

Also other apps start randomly with screen defects.

kernel 5.4.0-39
Gigabyte H61N-USB3 16GB RAM
i3250 (intel HD graphics 2500)
no additional video cards

I have upgraded from Ubuntu 19.10 to 20.04, and now I have a problem with my graphics rendering (strange squares on background and font problems). I use the i915 driver. Graphics card: Skylake GT2 HD Graphics 520. I tried to reinstall GNOME shell and Xorg server. Nothing helped. Also Chrome browser breaks on most of pages.

I've got troubles getting the i915 drivers to work correctly on my laptop (HP Pavilion DM4 2101ea).

Specifically, the laptop screen goes black and stays black after the splash graphic when booting both from USB key and from harddrive.

To get anything on to the display after the splash screen I have to boot either with

• acpi=off
• nomodeset
• i915.modeset=0

I'd rather not turn ACPI off because I like my fans spinning and nomodeset is a bit overkill, so for now I'm booting with i915.modeset=0.

Unfortunately, this turns off KMS and my current maximum resolution on the laptop screen is fixed to 1024x768 instead of its real capability.

When not setting any of the above boot flags and I plug in an external monitor, the external monitor works fine. When booting with the flags, the external monitor works fine too, but can only do 1024x768 and can't do anything else than mirroring the laptop display.

I did upgrade the i915 drivers from 2.17 that ship with Precise to 2.19 which are the most recent ones but without luck of getting anything to display.

Here's my lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b5)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev b5)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM65 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)
02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5116 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet (rev c0)

Here's lshw -C video

  *-display UNCLAIMED     
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
       version: 09
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:c0000000-c03fffff memory:b0000000-bfffffff ioport:4000(size=64)

Both outputs are generated after booting with i915.modeset=0.

Here's a complete Xorg.log file from a boot into a black screen: https://gist.github.com/479ce06454e47d6123e1

The graphics card is a Intel HD 3000 integrated GPU.

I've never had problems with Intel hardware on Ubuntu before so this is very surprising.

If you could

• provide a method to make i915 work,
• suggest alternative drivers
• a way to boot with i915.modeset=0 but higher resolutions and KMS on
• or explain what is happening and how to fix it

I'll give you an answer badge. :)

Thanks

I'm using a new HP Home G42-215BR notebook, which uses an Intel HD Graphics GPU (i915 kernel driver).

My Ubuntu 10.10 installation is new and is up-to-date.

When I choose to lock screen in the menu and close the lid, if I reopen the lid within a short period of time everything works. But if it stays idle for a while and I reopen the lid, I don't get the login screen. All that I can see is a black screen with my mouse cursor. I can switch to tty1 (which works) with no problem, but switching back to tty7 doesn't helps, I can't get the login screen anymore.

I don't want to have to reboot all the time I lock the screen... Any ideas?