# Pixel artifacts and kernel crash with Intel HD 3000 and i915kms driver



## Holger (Dec 29, 2022)

I have an Asus-X53S laptop which runs on a Intel-Core-i5-2410M notebook processor including an Intel HD 3000 graphics chipset. It has also an NVidia GeForce GT 520M, but I do not use that.

I am running Xorg on FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p5 using the i915kms driver.

When running multiple (GTK3?) applications, I observe pixel errors as if the screen is not refreshed properly. Manually issuing refresh commands via the Window Manager doesn't fix the issue. Even if the application exits, the pixel errors persist. Once I even got a kernel crash, but could not record a core-dump, because my system was not prepared for it.

I could *remedy* this problem by disabling the “Shadow Framebuffer” in the modesetting driver like so: I created a file /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-intel.conf with the following content:

```
Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz",
        ### <percent>: "<f>%"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "SWcursor"               # [<bool>]
        #Option     "kmsdev"                 # <str>
        Option     "ShadowFB"               "False"
        #Option     "AccelMethod"            # <str>
        #Option     "PageFlip"               # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ZaphodHeads"            # <str>
        #Option     "DoubleShadow"           # [<bool>]
        #Option     "Atomic"                 # [<bool>]
        #Option     "VariableRefresh"        # [<bool>]
        #Option     "UseGammaLUT"            # [<bool>]
        #Option     "AsyncFlipSecondaries"     # [<bool>]
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "modesetting"
    BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
```

Since then, I have never encountered that error again. I also haven't noticed any perfomance issues or something like that. So I would like to keep this solution here for documentation purposes.

My question, however, is: Is the problem (pixel/refresh errors with the i915kms driver) known? Is it worth investigating further?


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