Lafite Hardware Acceleration of HD 5500

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phaedrus

Member
Has anyone successfully used the Intel i915 driver to enable hardware acceleration of the HD 5500 with the Lafite screen?

For me, when Linux applies the i915 driver to the GPU, only the top few centimetres of the screen are drawn, and that then flickers. The rest of the screen remains blank. When an external monitor is used (HDMI to Samsung TV), and the laptop screen disabled, the monitor works perfectly, with hardware acceleration.

When the i915 driver is disabled (or modesetting turned off), Linux is falling back to the software acceleration of Gallium on llvmpipe. The laptop screen redraw/flickering problem is resolved, but there's no hardware acceleration.

I've recreated the problem on Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.04, and with a variety of uplevel and downlevel kernels. Also with different versions of the Intel drivers. DDC probing appears to be successful and modelines generated from that have been applied (as shown by xrandr).

Any thoughts about what to try next?

Lafité Silver Aluminium Chassis: 13.3" Matte Full HD IPS LED (1920 x 1080)
Processor: Intel® CoreTM i5 Dual Core Processor i5-5200U (2.20GHz, 2.7GHz Turbo)
Graphics: INTEL® HD GRAPHICS 5500
 
P

phaedrus

Member
Is there anyone out there with a Lafite 13.3 (not touchscreen) with working graphics on Linux (ideally Ubuntu)? I think my issues are related to the EDID data the screen provides to identify itself and its characteristics. Would you mind posting your EDID content as a file so that I can compare it with mine?

I use this command:
Code: 
sudo get-edid > edid.bin

If you don't have the tool installed, it's in the standard respositories:
Code: 
sudo apt-get install read-edid

If you would like to see the content of your EDID file, then you can run get-edid with parse-edid (both provided by the read-edid package):
Code: 
sudo get-edid | parse-edid

For a more comprehensive decoding of the EDID file, edid-decode can be used (installable as the edid-decode package):
Code: 
sudo get-edid | edid-decode

My edid-decode output is:
Code: 
tom@silver:~$ sudo get-edid | edid-decode 
This is read-edid version 3.0.1. Prepare for some fun.
Attempting to use i2c interface
Looks like no busses have an EDID. Sorry!
Attempting to use the classical VBE interface

	Performing real mode VBE call
	Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f00 bx=0x0 cx=0x0
	Function supported
	Call successful

	VBE version 300
	VBE string at 0xc99e4 "Intel(R) HSW Mobile/Desktop Graphics Chipset Accelerated VGA BIOS"

VBE/DDC service about to be called
	Report DDC capabilities

	Performing real mode VBE call
	Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x0 cx=0x0
	Function supported
	Call successful

	Monitor and video card combination does not support DDC1 transfers
	Monitor and video card combination supports DDC2 transfers
	0 seconds per 128 byte EDID block transfer
	Screen is not blanked during DDC transfer

Reading next EDID block

VBE/DDC service about to be called
	Read EDID

	Performing real mode VBE call
	Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x1 cx=0x0
	Function supported
	Call successful

Looks like VBE was successful. Have a good day.
Extracted contents:
header:          00 ff ff ff ff ff ff 00
serial number:   0d ae 61 13 00 00 00 00 07 18
version:         01 04
basic params:    a5 1d 11 78 02
chroma info:     ce 85 a3 57 4e 9d 26 12 50 54
established:     00 00 00
standard:        01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
descriptor 1:    36 36 80 a0 70 38 20 40 2e 1e 24 00 25 a5 10 00 00 18
descriptor 2:    24 24 80 a0 70 38 20 40 2e 1e 24 00 25 a5 10 00 00 18
descriptor 3:    00 00 00 fe 00 43 4d 4e 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
descriptor 4:    00 00 00 fe 00 4e 31 33 33 48 53 45 2d 45 41 33 0a 20
extensions:      00
checksum:        a1

Manufacturer: CMN Model 1361 Serial Number 0
Made week 7 of 2014
EDID version: 1.4
Digital display
8 bits per primary color channel
DisplayPort interface
Maximum image size: 29 cm x 17 cm
Gamma: 2.20
Supported color formats: RGB 4:4:4
First detailed timing is preferred timing
Established timings supported:
Standard timings supported:
Detailed mode: Clock 138.780 MHz, 293 mm x 165 mm
               1920 1966 1996 2080 hborder 0
               1080 1082 1086 1112 vborder 0
               -hsync -vsync
Detailed mode: Clock 92.520 MHz, 293 mm x 165 mm
               1920 1966 1996 2080 hborder 0
               1080 1082 1086 1112 vborder 0
               -hsync -vsync
ASCII string: CMN
         ASCII string: N133HSE-EA3
 Checksum: 0xa1
EDID block does NOT conform to EDID 1.3!
	Missing name descriptor
	Missing monitor ranges
tom@silver:~$

It reports that my Lafite 13.3 screen is not compliant with the EDID standard as it is missing data. The most significant looks to be the "monitor ranges", which I think might be the source of my flickering issues.

Thanks in advance!
 
P

phaedrus

Member
This has been discussed in more detail on an Ubuntu forum, here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2286157
And a bug report raised with the intel driver developer team, here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91393

Another new user of a pcspecialist Lafite 13.3 has experienced the same issue, so I suspect a recent hardware change to the model is conflicting with Linux. This could be a batch problem with the Lafite 13.3, a permanent problem, or a Linux deficiency. Either way, for two users at least, the Lafite 13.3 is not compatible with Linux.
 
P

phaedrus

Member
Still no offers to share a working EDID file? I'm running out of ideas now, and that working EDID would be a real help!
 
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raedwulf

Member
I fixed the flickering on my Lafite by changing the acceleration method because of known issues of the SNA which is default with X11.

In short, create a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and paste:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection


Restart. I did not need to mess around with the EDID.
 
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