"This is something you need to fix, or it'll stay completely painful
forever. It's hard work and takes years, but here at Intel we pulled
it off. We can upstream everything from a _very_ early stage (can't
tell you how early). And we have full marketing approval for that. If
you watch the i915 commit stream you can see how our code is chasing
updates from the hw engineers debugging things. Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation"
Well, whatever Intel has been doing, they're just successful as merging their codebase. It doesn't mean the driver is stable though.
The KMS/dri driver itself certainly has _major_ unsolved issues since basically forever. The KMS driver for broadwell graphics was trashing the screen with massive horizontal flicker until kernel 4.8. That's not a long time ago. It's still not solved BTW, just got less frequent. Random pipeline stalls happen on an hourly basis. Tons of graphical glitches and random performance issues with the "glamour" accell path. I've stopped reporting issues at their tracker, as they just get ignored.
The performance of the KMS driver is also inferior to their existing xorg driver in a number of very important scenarios (Xrender is particularly affected).
Sure, I do have vulkan drivers as first class, but my screen flickers, I get graphical corruption and the driver hangs the entire system with certain shaders. I can see inkscape repainting beneath my eyes like it's '84. Wow. And I'm trying that with 4.9 rc8.
I've been using laptops with integrated graphics for almost 10 years. The moment you can get the intel driver to work half-decently, they're already rewriting it. I wish I was kidding.
Intel does have the money. They're actually doing worse in my mind.
Intel got their sh*t together, why can't AMD ?