Stop using the intel driver

[dnschneid]

Past me says this:

Use modesetting; glamor will happen by default if available. Compatibility with Intel DRI has deteriorated significantly with Freon. Using modesetting will be the most compatible and only has a minor performance hit.

I don't remember what triggered me to make these patches, nor do I recall the result of testing or whether this is actually ready to merge.

I figure creating a PR will help figure things out...

[carbonatedcaffeine]

Good Idea Is it possible that this could be a target (as in you can disable and enable)

[tblaschke]

This fixes the missing characters using Xorg on a Samsung Chromebook Pro. Maybe we should test it on other Skylake Chromebooks and activate it by default?

[octopusnz]

Sounds like this might help with #2958 ? If so that is good news.

[dnschneid]

I can make a branch release with this patch if you want to try it.

[dnschneid]

You can give it a shot by updating your chroot with sudo CROUTON_BRANCH=nointeldrv crouton -u -n chrootname

[kelchm]

Related to #2640.

[dnschneid]

@kelchm @octopusnz does this branch fix things for either of you?

[octopusnz]

@dnschneid I think this does resolve #2958 for me, or at least has decreased the frequency.

[kelchm]

@dnschneid, it did not work for me the last time I tried -- let me give it another go tonight.

[kelchm]

@dnschneid, I've not been able to get this branch to work. Here's what I'm seeing:

sudo CROUTON_BRANCH=nointeldrv sh ~/Downloads/crouton -u -n xenial-gnome

...

Use 'apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  xserver-xorg-video-intel*
The following held packages will be changed:
  xserver-xorg-video-intel
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
E: Held packages were changed and -y was used without --allow-change-held-packages.
Failed to complete chroot setup.
Unmounting /mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots/xenial-gnome...
Sending SIGTERM to processes under /mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots/xenial-gnome...

[octopusnz]

Actually after playing with it for a few weeks - issue still exists (Chrome flickering). I'm assuming I managed to install from the right branch but based on the below maybe not?

I think for this to fix my issue it needs to stop using the i915 driver for the video card.

$ dpkg -s xserver-xorg-video-intel | grep Status Status: hold ok installed

$ lshw -c video WARNING: you should run this program as super-user. *-display
description: VGA compatible controller product: Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 0e width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=i915 latency=0 resources: irq:262 memory:d0000000-d03fffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff ioport:1000(size=8)

Possible I did something wrong when trying to install from the branch however. @dnschneid Is there a logfile for crouton for installs/upgrades that would let me easily check if I managed to install from a branch rather than master?

[dnschneid]

@octopusnz running croutonversion inside the chroot, or sudo edit-chroot -all from outside spit out the version strings, which include which branch was installed.

[ammaarpatel99]

has anyone switched to the no intel driver branch and has successfully stopped the screen flickering. im using the unity version of trusty on crouton and after the latest update the croot wouldnt load. i had to power wash my pixelbook, leave it for a few days and then reinstall crouton. the croot now loads but the screen and the curser flicker constantly with large section of the screen sometimes going black for a few seconds.

[rossjrw]

Using modeseting I've had major screen tearing issues and poor performance even just when alt+tabbing, with menu navigation sometimes reaching 80% on my cpu. Games on steam that I could previously play at ~60fps I now struggle to reach 10.

On the other hand, without the fix from this branch crouton doesn't work at all.

Any suggestions for getting my performance back?

Dell CB 13 i5, trusty

(I was also unable to update to this branch due to the same issue that @kelchm presented above - this was just from me manually changing to modesetting)

[ammaarpatel99]

I turned on OS verification last week and I have used it since then. Yesterday I went on it and restarted to upgrade flash something out another. Then I enabled developer mode and downloaded crouton from the GitHub page. I created an encrypted trusty unity chroot with touch enabled. Now the chroot works like a dream. I don't know what's changed but something is definitely different. I hope this helps.

[pmarkkula]

@rossjrw

You might want to check that you actually have hw accelerated opengl. Modesetting and glamor work also with sw fallback.

[rossjrw]

@pmarkkula Thanks for your response - do you know how I'd check this?

[pmarkkula]

@rossjrw

Try

glxinfo | grep -E "Vendor|Device"

in chroot. Mine says:

    Vendor: Intel Open Source Technology Center (0x8086)
    Device: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Broadwell GT1  (0x1606)

[rossjrw]

@pmarkkula Many thanks for your help. The command you suggested had no output, although I also tried a lowercase version glxinfo | grep -E "vendor|device" which had the output

server glx vendor string: SGI
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc.

Assuming this means I'm SW accelerated, how would I correct this?

[pmarkkula]

@rossjrw

You might be missing the appropriate driver package.

apt-cache policy xserver-xorg-video-intel

should tell if this is the case.

[rossjrw]

@pmarkkula the output of that command is the following:

xserver-xorg-video-intel:
  Installed: 2:2.99.910-0ubuntu1.7
  Candidate: 2:2.99.910-0ubuntu1.7
  Version table:
 *** 2:2.99.910-0ubuntu1.7 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2:2.99.910-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages

I have no clue what to make of this - could you shed some wisdom?

[pmarkkula]

@rossjrw

So the Intel driver is installed. If it would not have been, it would have said something like "Installed: (none)". I am running out of ideas.

[rossjrw]

@pmarkkula That's fair - thank you for all the help you've given anyway!

[tylerhoot]

found a error with this build upgraded, 8 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. E: Held packages were changed and -y was used without --allow-change-held-packages. Failed to complete chroot setup.

[bline]

Has there been any movement on this? I just installed xenial xfce with the latest crouton and have a lot of flickering from chrome, not really usable. This is on skylake c302 asus flip. Somehow this branch will not install. The command: sudo CROUTON_BRANCH=nointeldrv crouton -u downloads a github 404 page.

[dnschneid]

Has there been any movement on this? I just installed xenial xfce with the latest crouton and have a lot of flickering from chrome, not really usable. This is on skylake c302 asus flip. Somehow this branch will not install. The command: sudo CROUTON_BRANCH=nointeldrv crouton -u downloads a github 404 page.

I had removed the release because it was terribly out-of-date. I just rebased and pushed a new release for the branch. You're welcome to try it but I have no idea if it'll work at all.

[bline]

Thanks for the update. I ran the update to this branch mentioned above with this error:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  xserver-xorg-video-intel*
The following held packages will be changed:
  xserver-xorg-video-intel
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
E: Held packages were changed and -y was used without --allow-change-held-packages.
Failed to complete chroot setup.

Can I manually run this remove or was there more that needs to happen after that?

[bline]

I went ahead and did that remove. startxfce4 went to grey screen with mouse and locked my system.

[dnschneid]

Great success :/

Can you please create a new chroot with it just to be sure it's totally broken?

Unfortunately I don't have the devices or time to get this tested and working at the moment, but if you find some tweaks that make things work I can incorporate it into the branch.

[bline]

So I ran this from a new chroot with the following command: sudo CROUTON_BRANCH=nointeldrv crouton -t xfce,touch,cli-extra,chrome,audio,extension -n xenial2 It failed with:

Compiling /usr/local/lib/croutonfreon.so...
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package 'xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse' is not installed, so not removed
Package 'xserver-xorg-video-all' is not installed, so not removed
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 xorg : Depends: xserver-xorg (>= 1:7.7+13ubuntu3.1)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
Failed to complete chroot setup.
Unmounting /mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots/xenial2...

I would be happy to help in anyway you need.