Comment 12 for bug 456902

Adam, thanks for doing a good job at documenting these freezes.

I have forwarded this bug upstream to the intel developers at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24825 . Please subscribe to that bug report (i.e. get an account if you don't have one and add yourself to the CC field), so that you can answer any questions that they might have.

There are a few things you can do right away to narrow down the cause a bit further. Try to turn off Desktop Effects and see if the freezes still happens then. If it does, the cause is not in the compositing stuff. Another option is to turn off KMS by using nomodeset at the boot command line (Esc to bring up the Grub menu at boot if you don't have it already, 'e' to edit the command line, add 'nomodeset' right after 'quiet' and 'splash'). Finally, you can check if the problem exists in the latest upstream versions by (separately and together) testing with xorg-edgers (https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa) and a recent mainline kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ (you only need to install the linux-image package for your architecture).