Beware: Linux kernel 5.19.12 could damage your Intel laptop display, literally

Beware: Linux kernel 5.19.12 could damage your Intel laptop display, literally

It looks like one of the recent Linux kernel updates is causing issues with Intel laptops. Apparently the 5.19.12 update is not playing nice with Intel's graphics i915 driver and this is leading to all sorts of issues. For example, below is an example of a user who said that they were almost constantly encountering weird flashing problems. The user added they had the issue on a Lenovo laptop powered by i7-1065G7 running Fedora 35.

Other users are reporting similar issues on Intel 11th Gen chips as well. This user confirmed that downgrading to the previous 5.19.11 release fixes the problem:

I'm on a laptop (Lenovo Legion 5 Gen7 15IAH7H, Alder Lake i7-12700H) and when I boot this kernel, the laptop internal screen seems to flicker between "on but completely black" and "off" every second or so without actually displaying anything.

[..] This reproduces consistently on my machine with 5.19.12 and disappears immediately after downgrading to 5.19.11.

Over on the Framework community forum, affected users have been raising this issue for close to a week now, and it looks like an Intel Linux kernel engineer, Ville Syrjäl, had picked it up. Syrjäl says that the panel power sequencing (PPS) delay is bugged which could potentially even damage the LCD panels. He wrote:

After looking at some logs we do end up with potentially bogus panel power sequencing delays, which may harm the LCD panel.

[..] I recommend immediate revert of this stuff, and new stable release ASAP. Plus a recommendation that no one using laptops with Intel GPUs run 5.19.12.

The 5.19.12 changes have been reverted with a new stable release (5.19.13). Users are reporting that this has indeed fixed the issue.

Via: Phoronix