Comment 8 for bug 1925685

Revision history for this message
Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer) wrote : Re: [SRU] Patch for flicker and glitching on certain hardware, intel framebuffer,

Sadly, we can't wait that long, Kai-Heng. This is a patch that is critical to our operation and is causing money to be lost daily on machines we can't sell. There are other OEMs that are affected by this as well.

The aforementioned patch is headed to kernel 5.13, due out in June. If this weren't so time-sensitive, we could have just waited for that kernel or later kernels, such as what will land in 22.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that's a year away, which is an unacceptable wait time.

What you're currently asking us to do is wait until July/August for the HWE kernel to get updated prior to 20.04.3's release. That's also an unacceptable wait time as those are sales that we can't make in that time. We've been working with our ODM to try to resolve it from a hardware standpoint, but they're having a tough time accepting it as a defect since it works fine on Windows, so it must be a Linux thing (which is also unacceptable that Linux can even let this happen).

So, I guess I'm asking you (or someone else on the kernel team) to do the right thing. As you can see from Mike's post above, the testing we have done is extensive and uses the 5.8 kernel, and even tested on older machines. I understand your reluctance, but we're not simply a user having trouble with their machine, we're a company trying successfully to sell Ubuntu (Kubuntu, in this case) on laptops. We have a partnership with Canonical on this as well as the Kubuntu council as the only OEM allowed to use the Kubuntu name on its products.

Basically, "eventually" doesn't work for us, we need this ASAP, hence the "critical" priority.