How to fix Intel DRI crashes when playing video full screen?

Question

When playing video in Orion, I get an error and an orion segfault like:

Failed to open BO for returned DRI2 buffer (1920x1080, dri2 back buffer, named x)
This is likely a bug in the X Server that will lead to a crash soon.

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[...] in ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_dri.so
[...]

This segfault happens occasionally in normal windowed playback, and almost immediately in full screen mode playback.

I'm using Debian 8 (jessie) with Gnome 3 on an ASUS laptop which supports hybrid graphics, but I'm sticking with the Intel graphics if possible to reduce power consumption.

Answer 1

Similar error behaviour has been reported on Intel graphics hardware with a variety of software that uses DRI. There is an upstream bug report on freedesktop.org. Someone noted on there that this issue is fixed with the 2.99.917-2~bpo8+1 0 version of xserver-xorg-video-intel in the jessie-backports repository. Updating to it fixed the problem (instructions below).

Note that my laptop has an Intel wireless NIC with firmware from the non-free firmware-iwlwifi package, and since the change prompted a kernel upgrade, to maintain connectivity, I made sure to add the non-free package index and upgrade firmware-iwlwifi also.

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Add the line deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free
3. Save and exit
4. Run sudo apt-get update
5. Run sudo apt-get upgrade -t jessie-backports xserver-xorg-video-intel
6. Run sudo apt-get upgrade -t jessie-backports firmware-iwlwifi
7. Restart Linux.

If you can't or won't do this upgrade for whatever reason, there are some other reported workarounds on the upstream bug.