Frequent pauses/freezing in Gnome Shell/Ubuntu 13.10 with Sandy Bridge

While doing any graphics heavy task, such as playing a game or just watching Netflix via pipelight I was getting frequent pauses, where the entire system would lock up for ~5 seconds.

Dmesg was showing the following whenever it happened:

[drm:i915_set_reset_status] *ERROR* render ring hung inside bo 3.11

It turns out this is related to a bug in Mesa, which has been fixed in 10.0. To update to this in Ubuntu 13.10, add this repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers

then:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

and restart.

Be aware that while these packages seemed stable for me, they could well result in system instability for others. Make sure you know what you're doing and have a recovery plan, or backups should you need to revert. Something like PPA-Purge is likely the trick.