Ivy Bridge HD4000 Linux Freeze

First thing I did after I received my new Ivy Bridge PC with Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H and Intel Core i7 3770 was install the new Ubuntu 12.04.  All was fine for a while until the PC would freeze up, mouse not moving, ATL+CTRL+F1 not working, nothing!  This seemed to happen every-time semi heavy load was placed on the HD 4000 graphics processor on the i7 chip.  Something I found that really triggered this was browsing websites like Google maps or scrolling up and down on a page with lots of dynamic content in Firefox it is a guaranteed freeze.

After a bit of trail and error the solutions was found.  There seems to be a bug in the Linux Kernel 3.2.x.  Now after upgrading to Kernel 3.3.x the problem has disappeared!  Below are the steps to update the kernel in Ubuntu 12.04.

Please note I do not take any responsibility if this breaks things.  This worked for me and I am merely trying to help others.

At the time of writing this article the latest stable kernel is 3.3.6

The kernel can be found at kernel.ubuntu.com or you can just ignore this and copy and past the commands below to the terminal depending on you installation

For Ubuntu (i386 / 32-bit) run these commands

 cd /tmp && wget -O linux-headers-3.3.6-030300_3.3.6_all.deb http://goo.gl/zNlMy  
 sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.3.6-030300_3.3.6_all.deb  
 cd /tmp && wget -O linux-headers-3.3.6-generic_i386.deb http://goo.gl/TdBex  
 sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.3.6-generic_i386.deb  
 cd /tmp && wget -O linux-image-3.3.6-generic_i386.deb http://goo.gl/osZhw  
 sudo dpkg -i linux-image-3.3.6-generic_i386.deb  

For Ubuntu (amd64 / 64-bit) run these commands

  cd /tmp && wget -O linux-headers-3.3.6-030300_3.3.6_all.deb http://goo.gl/zNlMy  
 sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.3.6-030300_3.3.6_all.deb  
 cd /tmp && wget -O linux-headers-3.3.6-generic_amd64.deb http://goo.gl/Z9Ztt  
 sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.3.6-generic_amd64.deb  
 cd /tmp && wget -O linux-image-3.3.6-generic_amd64.deb http://goo.gl/jji3o  
 sudo dpkg -i linux-image-3.3.6-generic_amd64.deb 

Just reboot your system and done.

I you have any questions/problems please leave a comment and I will try to help