After removing the xf86-video-intel package and changing the driver in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf from "intel" to "modesetting" I got rid of most
issues. Just one time Firefox suffered from a short, but still too long
performance issue (maybe a random thing), but usually even Firefox
seems
to perform better, apart from this the performance of all other apps
seems to be faster, which not necessarily is an important win, it's
just good that it seems to be no loss, performance with 4.19 kernels
and the "Intel" driver is very good, too, maybe scarcely perceptible
slower. FWIW this machine does use SSDs only.
Hi,
Firefox hangs might not be related to the kernel.
It is a known issue that IO can suffer greatly when under high GPU load
at the same time, and browsers tend to do both at once (hardware
acceleration and sqlite db for session, cookies, local storage etc.).
That is one of the reasons to use
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon and run the
browser from tmpfs.
The other reason to do this is that the browser feels much faster as
well :)
Maybe give this a try, it sounds like it might help you.
Cheers,
Bennett