Tweaking Intel graphics on Linux

Speed things up a bit with few grub modifications

get info about firmware

modinfo i915 | grep ^fi

List all driver parameters

modinfo -p i915

If find the output of the above command confusing, as you can’t see the actual values of every parameter, then use:

sudo grep -H '' /sys/module/i915//parameters/*

If you see error messages like this one:

$ dmesg |tail
[ 2360.475430] [drm] not enough stolen space for compressed buffer (need 4325376 bytes), disabling
[ 2360.475437] [drm] hint: you may be able to increase stolen memory size in the BIOS to avoid this

then you can enable framebuffer compression. This should also save your laptop some energy:

# list all grub menu entries
sudo grubby --info=ALL
# you can also display info about the currently used config with:
sudo grubby --info=0
# to enable FBS, run command below with appropriate kernel version:
sudo grubby --args="i915.enable_fbc=1" --update-kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.10-300.fc27.x86_64
# you can also check if your changes were persisted:
sudo grubby --info=

Related reading:

Enable GuC / HuC 1 firmware loading:

  • GuC is an engine for workload scheduling of the parallel graphics engines.
  • HuC appears to be a firmware blob responsible High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC / H.265) support.
sudo grubby --args="i915.enable_guc_loading=1 i915.enable_guc_submission=1" --update-kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.10-300.fc27.x86_64

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics#Enable_GuC_.2F_HuC_firmware_loading


  1. more info on phoronix  ↩︎