Comment 25 for bug 563555

Bug #566324 (Xorg crash) also affects me, I tried the following to remedy the frequent screen crashes:-

echo options i915 modeset=1 | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf

This does help reduce the number of Xorg crashes, but more importantly, it does affect the cursor.
After doing this, the cursor is present on every bootup without the need to do anything else to restore it,

Not really sure what this is doing to graphics performance though.