Bug 1110985

Created attachment 785280 [details]
hwinfo

I should have mentioned that this is a fresh install of Tumbleweed with Plasma. Before on this same laptop I was using Tumbleweed with the Cinnamon desktop and the Intel driver (SNA accel) with zero stability issues.

Ok. This is still Ivybridge. Since you said yourself this still worked on TW previously using the Intel SNA driver, it would be worth a try to install
xf86-video-intel package on your freshly installed TW. If this doesn't help, this looks like a regression in the kernel driver.

Or with Plasma we now have completely different requirements for the desktop WRT 3D acceleration, so trying to use Cinnamon desktop again might be the first option.

Hi, thanks a lot for the reply.

Sorry I wasn't clear, this bug report for random freezing is with my fresh TW installation, using Plasma and the xf86-video-intel driver with SNA.

Just to show that it's not a fundamentally buggy machine, I mentioned that previously I was running TW on it with the **Cinnamon** desktop and the xf86-video-intel driver with SNA.

I originally would have filed this as a Plasma bug, since the only difference appears to be in the desktop environment. But I've researched and asked around a lot, and the general opinion appears to be that Plasma's way of using the video card makes it more likely to run into an underlying Xorg Intel driver bug. Here are some links:
- https://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/08/06/1336251/kde-plasma-5-problem-traced-to-bug-in-intel-graphics-driver
- https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?t=127575
- https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/526313-Plasma-5-Intel-Graphics-Leap-42-3
- https://forum.manjaro.org/t/kde-plasma-desktop-freezing/34855
- https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/526608-KDE-Freezes-randomly-and-only-the-mouse-pointer-works

I should also mention that I ran the same TW with Cinnamon installation on this laptop for a long time, like 3 years, and I just did the fresh TW install with Plasma a few days ago. It's my daily driver computer.

Well. In that case you may also try modesetting/GLAMOR, i.e. uninstall xf86-video-intel package.

So did you give it a try?

Since my last post here, I've been running the Intel driver still, but with the Plasma compositor using the Xrender backend. It's looking tentatively much more stable. I'll switch it back to the openGL backend soon to see if it starts freezing again.

(In reply to S. B. from comment #8)
> Since my last post here, I've been running the Intel driver still, but with
> the Plasma compositor using the Xrender backend. It's looking tentatively
> much more stable. I'll switch it back to the openGL backend soon to see if
> it starts freezing again.

Ok. Any news you can share with us on this topic?

(In reply to Stefan Dirsch from comment #9)
> (In reply to S. B. from comment #8)
> > Since my last post here, I've been running the Intel driver still, but with
> > the Plasma compositor using the Xrender backend. It's looking tentatively
> > much more stable. I'll switch it back to the openGL backend soon to see if
> > it starts freezing again.
> 
> Ok. Any news you can share with us on this topic?

Sorry, not yet, as I was busy with some important work that I couldn't risk losing to a freeze. I just now switched the compositor to openGL again, and I'll report back here immediately if it freezes on me.

(In reply to S. B. from comment #10)
> I've been running the Intel driver still, but with
> the Plasma compositor using the Xrender backend. 
> It's looking tentatively > > > much more stable. I'll
> switch it back to the openGL backend soon to see if
> it starts freezing again.

Ok, I just now had a freeze with the openGL 2.0 backend, and I had to kill Xorg to recover. Looks like it's the same as the references I linked in #c4, something about the way Kwin uses openGL exposes an underlying flaw in the Intel driver.

Ok, so no good news. But nevertheless thanks for giving it a try!

(In reply to Stefan Dirsch from comment #12)
> Ok, so no good news. But nevertheless thanks for giving it a try!

Also thanks to you for looking into it. Please let me know if you need any more information.

I've been experiencing similar freezes recently. Desktop stays visible, mouse can move, music continues playing as normal, but no interaction possible.
No CPU load on X11 nor kwin.

Just now I managed to restore my desktop by going to a virtual terminal, searching for the kwin_x11 process and killing it with `kill -9` then restarting it with `kwin_x11 --replace`. I also killed plasmashell and restarted it the same way. No lost work fortunately, for once.

It started happening after I reinstalled Tumbleweed about a month ago.

Hardware is Dell XPS 13 9333 with Intel driver (I'll attach hwinfo).
Compositor is on openGL 3.1.

This is without any workarounds. Before the reinstall, the desktop was stable.

S.B. did you try switching to UXA yet ? I might try that next as I think I had it before the reinstall. I also remember having worse performance with UXA with Youtube which is why I didn't reenable it yet.

Created attachment 791658 [details]
hwinfo-pvince81

More info about my setup:

i+ | intel-gpu-tools     | package | 1.23-2.1                       | x86_64 | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Oss
i+ | intel-vaapi-driver  | package | 2.2.0-1.1                      | x86_64 | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Oss
i+ | libdrm_intel1       | package | 2.4.96-1.1                     | x86_64 | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Oss
i+ | libdrm_intel1-32bit | package | 2.4.96-1.1                     | x86_64 | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Oss
i+ | libvulkan_intel     | package | 18.1.7-208.1                   | x86_64 | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Oss
i+ | ucode-intel         | package | 20180807a-1.1                  | x86_64 | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Oss
i+ | xf86-video-intel    | package | 2.99.917+git8674.25c9a2fcc-1.1 | x86_64 | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Oss


Plasma is 5.14.3-1.1

S. B., could you check whether things improved with latest kernels from 

  https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Kernel_of_the_day

Try with intel and modesetting driver, please.

(In reply to Stefan Dirsch from comment #16)
> S. B., could you check whether things improved with latest kernels from 
> 
>   https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Kernel_of_the_day
> 
> Try with intel and modesetting driver, please.


Hi, sorry for the delay. I usually have to run VirtualBox for my work, so it's kind of difficult to use a different kernel version. With the standard TW kernel currently at 4.20.12-1-default, I experience relatively frequent (a few times during the workday) problems with xf86-video-intel and Kwin openGL compositing where only the mouse moves but nothing is clickable.

Ok. So no improvements. :-( Thanks for testing nevertheless!

Any new results you could provide with Leap 15.1, Leap 15.2-Beta or Tumbleweed?

Hi Stefan, I'm going to cautiously say that it is much better now. On my main Tumbleweed + Plasma workstation, I switch back and forth between Intel and Xmodesetting, and I'm currently on Intel. It seems to be behaving pretty well, so I'll close this bug for now. I'll re-open it if anything else comes up. Thanks for the help!

Thanks a lot for the positive feedback! :-)