[SOLVED] Potential video card failing. How to test

Trilby · 2014-08-09 00:46:24

I've been having video driver issues for well over a month. It started with sporadic kernel panics on boot or wake from suspend [1] that seemed to be fixed by a downgrade of the intel drivers and mesa - though perhaps I just wasn't seeing it as often with the downgraded version.

I've also started having firefox crashes with the same error message as another user [2]. I've found a site that can replicate these FF crashes consistentently and posted some of the error output in that thread. I have also, however, switched out the intel drivers with fbdev. With fbdev FF does not crash and I'll run fbdev for a while to see if I also avoid the kernel panics.

On top of this, I have sporadic issues with X cursor images. Fragments of a window, for example, will become the cursor image and get dragged around the screen as I move the mouse. This has been less common and I have not been able to gather any relevant data on it yet.

In summary, it's looking like I'm having a variety of intel video driver issues. I've been watching the forums and upstream bug trackers, but unless I'm missing it there has not been an upswell of reported issues that would suggest the recent driver versions are 'lemons' - so either I'm just extremely unlucky, or there is something specific to my system.

Given this latter possibility, I'm looking for help diagnosing or testing my video hardware - could my video hardware be failing? I'm currently clueless on how to proceed with that - any suggestions would be welcome. My card:

$ lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)

As a related question, I'm curious what the downsides would be of just sticking with fbdev. I'm running it now and I can see no visual differences - even streaming video works fine. Are there any 'gotchas' I should be aware of that the fbdev driver cannot do that intel drivers can?

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81175

[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=184467

EDIT: I'll be damned ... I just found another problem that is due to the intel driver. I've had an odd quirk in some software I've written that creates custom cursors (big block 'erasers'). As I'm one of only a couple people using the software, I couldn't get much input, but it was getting annoying and I've been wondering how to track it down. There is no issue with fbdev - it works as intended. So I can confirm there are custom cursor drawing issues on my machine with the intel driver.

EDIT 2: I've found one downside of fbdev: that program mentioned above is a very graphics intensive program (rendering, scaling, rerendering, etc) that churns a large amount of visual data. Zooming in and out with fbdev lags noticably while it is quite smooth with intel drivers. This cost is well worth all the benefits for now - but for the purposes of this thread, this seems to confirm that my video card is at least doing part of it's job.

SOLVED: I feel a bit foolish. SNA had been working for me for a long time so I had forgot about the option of selecting UXA. I just added the xorg config to specify uxa, and so far that has fixed the issues.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-08-09 01:08:37)

Arch Linux

#1 2014-08-09 00:46:24

[SOLVED] Potential video card failing. How to test

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