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[ARTICLE · art-106199] src=lists.freedesktop.org ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Linus Torvalds uses AI to debug an Intel GPU driver bug

Linus Torvalds fixed a one-line bug in the Linux kernel's Xe Intel GPU driver that caused random screen corruption and job timeouts, after spending a day debugging the issue. The bug, introduced two years ago in commit 37173392741c, rounded up the CCS memory address to the nearest 128kB boundary, causing the driver to use memory that wasn't aligned, leading to corruption when used for GPU page tables. Torvalds committed the fix as commit 818bebeb63dd ("drm/xe: Don't hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM").

read2 min views1 publishedAug 21, 2026

drm: xe: Kernel-submitted job timed out Linus Torvalds torvalds at linux-foundation.org Fri Aug 21 03:50:44 UTC 2026 Previous message (by thread): drm: xe: Kernel-submitted job timed out Next message (by thread): [PATCH v4 0/5] powervr: MT8173 GPU support Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

On Tue, 18 Aug 2026 at 23:55, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> It turns out that now I can generate those drm job timedout issues at will.
>
> [  +1.222075] xe 0000:4b:00.0: [drm] Tile0: GT0: Engine reset:

Ok. I've spent all day today on chasing this down in between merge
window work, since it finally *was* repeatable.

And the fix ends up being basically a one-liner, even if the debug
session to get there was not.

The Xe driver takes the memory address used for the memory stolen for
CCS, and rounds it up to the nearest 128kB area.

And that is very VERY wrong, because it means that the xe driver will
then *use* that part of memory that wasn't at a 128kB boundary. And
the HW engine will too and write to it.

And when that memory happens ot be used for GPU page tables, very bad
things happen.

I bet this also explains some occasional random screen corruption I've
seen - when the memory isn't used for something as important as a page
table, it "only" corrupts random bitmap memory and the like.

I committed the fix as commit 818bebeb63dd ("drm/xe: Don't hand out
the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM").

Adding some people from commit 37173392741c ("drm/xe/vram: fix ccs
offset calculation") to the cc, because that's where the problem came
from. Two years ago. I'm not sure why it became so repeatable for me
now, but some user space behavior change clearly triggered it now
pretty much every single boot.

                 Linus

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