I have difficulty getting hardware accelaration to work properly with my integrated Intel 5500 graphics even with the use of newer drivers.I'm using a stable version of Debian 8 / Jessie (with the stock 3.16.0-4-amd64 kernel) on a Thinkpad T450s.I know that Debian 8 doesn't support the Broadwell chips out of the box, so I installed xserver-xorg-video-intel from the backports. Things looked bright at first... I have hardware acceleration working, however this has made the system unstable. Occasionally, videos will stutter, Gnome may crash, or Gnome even completely hangs and prevents me from taking any action any more.Most of the time there is no real issue, and the above mentioned problems happen about once every 2 days.I've tried seeing if there is an improvement after a configuration change by creating a configuration file in the following location: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf. The configuration files reads as follows:Section Device   Identifier  Intel Graphics   Driver      intel   Option      AccelMethod  uxaEndSectionThe problem persists with or without the above configuration change.Any suggestions on how to deal with this?UPDATE:I've been using the 4.5.1-1~bpo8+1 backported kernel now for about 2 weeks, as suggested in an answer. It has improved the situation in part, but errors persist.The problem now is that, at times, the system stutters and appears to hang for 1 second to 1 minute, on occasion. This happens about once or twice during a day of 7 + hours of use. This is an improvement over the previous problem of a full system hang. Now, I can wait out the temporary hang, then restart the computer without losing any ongoing work. I haven't been able to figure out what causes or triggers this issue.Further suggestions welcome.
Hardware accelaration on integrated Intel 5500 graphics and Debian result in unstable system
debian;xorg;graphics;intel graphics
Since you've already enabled backports, I'd suggest trying the latest backported kernel, 4.5.1-1~bpo8+1 as of this writing. The kernel's Intel GPU driver has been vastly improved since 3.16, and should be much more stable.