drm-i915kms + x11-intel eats out all of the ram and swap but not with x11-scfb

[Theron]

Please forgive the following for being not exactly related to the memory 
leak, but very relevant to scfb vs. modesetting vs. intel:

On 2020-04-14 19:44, Tomasz CEDRO wrote:
> I forgot that xf86-video-intel is for the old cards only
So, new cards (newer than skylake at least) don't encounter 
frame-tearing problem (completely unacceptable to me) even with 
modesetting driver and no compositor ?  But the software design bug is 
still there either way if it can happen on some hardware.  Sorry, I have 
no idea whether it's a hardware timing being configured wrong or a 
software data race, but when I've heard "use a compositor" proposed as a 
solution, it smells of underlying ill-conceived implementation.  I 
wouldn't be surprised if Linux graphics has this same problem, but I 
don't run that.

Shame to see xf86-video-intel being treated as if it's deprecated 
software meanwhile modesetting driver lags behind it on this basic level 
of image quality.

> , the new way
> is to use drm-kmod + xorg modesetting this is my default setup (even
> no xorg.conf).
>
> I am sometimes using scfb when no drm is loaded just to have xorg working.
Using scfb with i915kms loaded (yes it does work, no reason not to) 
actually gives substantial power savings for me (530 Skylake GT2 0x191b) 
compared to using xf86-video-intel: even with Xorg and a few 
non-animated graphical apps I can have power consumption on laptop 
almost as low as in console, but of course it is not good for video.  
Xorg+xf86-video-intel always wastes a few watts no matter what I try.

Theron