[computer] adventures in *nix

My Toshiba laptop (purchased by the DSA) finally had the keyboard finally give up the ghost entirely (this being the proximate cause of the trigger finger, which is doing very nicely with copious overnight splinting), having already had substantial problems with various other bits of its hardware in addition to overall slowing down a lot, and it was just... time for a new laptop.

So I went and bought a new-to-me refurbed Dell laptop (Latitude 7280) and it's generally doing rather well. Except that it does this fascinating thing, after a few but inconsistent hours of use, of just... losing ext4 and everything on it, and also producing the error message [drm:gen8_irq_handler [i915]] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun.

Which shows up a lot with not much concrete by way of obvious fixes, so herewith a list of things I've experimented with so far:

• checking the SSD health, all of which is fine
  
• swapping from "RAID On" to "AHCI" in BIOS (because some people suggested this might help; changed the precise nature of the symptoms in terms of things staying usable slightly longer and also getting an exciting blue-green screen gradient, but didn't actually fix the problem)
  
• looking for any sort of auto power-down on the SSD that Debian might be handling inelegantly (and failing to find one)
  
• confirming I'm really definitely on a later kernel version than the one that seems to be associated with this bug being introduced
  
• confirming that I have the various xorg bits of video-intel that might reasonably be expected, and that they are (as these things go) up to date
  
• actually updating my BIOS

... so now I get to wait a day or so and see if the BIOS update magically fixes things, and if not I probably need to start faffing with my x11 config in slightly greater earnest.