Comment 32 for bug 451518

I'm seeing this problem too, since I moved from Kubuntu 8.04 to 9.10. HW: Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E4010D and a intel 955 GPU, all the latest patches for xorg and kde loaded, also from PPA. Kernel 2.6.31-20, but same problems from on -14. KDE 4.4.1, xserver-xorg-video-intel - 2:2.9.01-1. Basically 3 types of graphics errors with different severity and effects:

the little tabs or hints with detailed info from the task bar don't always show up at the right place, and don't always get removed right. A bit annoying, but not too serious. One way to reproduce: left click on the network manager icon after bootup, the info shows up in the top left corner of the screen. Right click on the icon, info directly next to it, left click from from on then on the same. Every other effects alike are random, couldn't find a way to reproduce.

video from a webcam (Logitech C300) on skype or cheese never worked for me on 9.10. No streaming of any video data in anyone of the 2 apps, but mplayer worked fine! I almost gave up on this, but the latest xorg intel driver update around the frame buffer alignment bug made it happen, and everything perfectly works now, thx!

the third bug is about the one mentioned everywhere above, a complete lockup of the screen, randomly, maybe 2 days in a row fine, then 3 times a day. Always in conjunction with some heavier graphics activities, like opening some new windows, selecting a bigger text etc., and only a complete shutdown helps. I'm still not that deep into all the tools, but after such a lockup we still can get onto the laptop with ssh, and I think it was ksysguard showing the "i915_gem_retire_work_handler" status for the i915 driver. This bug is extremely annoying, and I've lost quite some work due to it already..

OK, a few days ago I found just by coincidence the 100% killer for my system, it's Google Earth, the latest downloadable version. Just start, and within a few seconds my laptop graphics is dead. Perfectly works on another system with all the same os and graphics versions as on my laptop, but with a ATI radeon GPU, could verify this today, so it's not like I thought a bug in Google Earth, but apparently in the graphics driver.

this other PC also doesn't experience the lockups, and never did so. But it had this "hints location" problem too, which disappeared since we've changed in the BIOS (!!!) the default settings for the graphics card from PCI to PCIe, which it really is.

sorry if I messed up a little bit here and maybe put too many things into this thread, but I think most or all of the bugs are clearly related and come down just to the intel i915 xorg driver.

could anybody with more linux knowledge than me please verify the Google Earth i915 killer, and publish the appropriate info, or tell me what exactly to do in order to provide the necessary info.

TIA