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Critical Intel Graphics Driver Bug Puts KDE Plasma 5 in a Really Bad Light

The bug appears to affect many GNU/Linux distributions

Aug 6, 2015 01:13 GMT  ·  By
KDE Plasma 5
   KDE Plasma 5

On August 5, Martin Sandsmark informed us all that there's a critical bug in the Intel graphics stack leading to a huge number of crashes for all users of the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

According to Mr. Sandsmark, the bug is pretty serious, and it can also crash various other OpenGL applications running on top of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop. The bug appears to have recently been introduced, which means that it does not affect all the KDE Plasma-based GNU/Linux distributions out there, especially those with an older version of the Intel i915 graphics driver stack.

The bug is currently tracked in the Mesa 3D Graphics Library bug tracker, in the KDE bug tracker for Plasma Shell, as well as various other OpenGL apps, including Gwenview, MPV, and Kodi. Users of distributions like Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed appear to be affected by the bug.

"I'd like to draw your attention to a pretty serious bug that is leading to massive amount of crashes for users of Plasma (and other applications using OpenGL)," says Martin Sandsmark. "This is starting to put Plasma 5 in an unjustified and really bad light, even I myself thought Plasma 5 was just buggy and "not ready", before I actually dug into the issue."

The mystery of KDE Plasma 5 being buggy was revealed

As Mr. Sandsmark reports, there are numerous complains all over the Internet about how buggy the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment is, something that we can also confirm from our readers over Google+ and Twitter social networks. Well, apparently, KDE Plasma 5 runs just fine, and the issue is related to a serious Intel graphics stack bug.

At the moment of writing this article, there's no information about which version of the Intel Graphics Stack Driver includes the critical bug that crashes KDE Plasma 5 and many other applications that use OpenGL, but Mr. Sandsmark's report suggests it's in a newer version as it affects GNU/Linux distributions that ship recent builds of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

Here's the workaround, thanks to the Manjaro Linux leader!

The good news is that a workaround for the bug is already available, and it requires you to modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf file from your Linux kernel-based operating system, by switching back to the older UXA acceleration method instead of the default SNA method used in many distros. Below is an example of what your 20-intel.conf file should look like if you're running KDE Plasma 5.

code
Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
        Driver      "intel"
        Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
EndSection
Credits for the workaround go to Philip Müller, the leader and manager of the popular Arch Linux-based Manjaro distribution. Mr. Sandsmark urges all distribution vendors who ship KDE Plasma 5 to immediately inform their users about the issue and either downgrade the Intel Graphics Stack Driver to an older version or apply the above workaround via an update. The Intel developers have been informed about the bug.