Arch Linux

Czarcasmo

Member

From: Colorado Springs, Colorado

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 82

Acer TimelineU, Intel Graphics annoying flickering/tearing

Hello,

I've been using an Acer Aspire TimelineU M5-581T-6807 as my primary machine and about ten days or two weeks ago, the video started doing a very annoying and distracting...flicker? tear? when doing work. Does not matter if I am on the terminal, in awesome, running a browser, etc. I have checked my settings and everything appears to be fine, nothing showing in the journal. I was hoping that with the Intel driver update yesterday and the kernel update today that it would fix my problem, but it appears to not have fixed it. Is it an i915 problem, kernel not liking my video, or Arch not liking my laptop right now?

For what it's worth, I believe it coincided when I upgraded my kernel from 3.9.x to 3.10, but I also do not want to have to downgrade if there is something else I am missing or can do to remove this. I'm hoping I'm not the only one seeing this, too.

Thank you in advance,
Czar.

---

Laptop: Lenovo X1 Carbon, Core i7 2.0Ghz, 8GB RAM, Gnome 3.16

mrln0

Member

Registered: 2013-08-07

Posts: 8

Re: Acer TimelineU, Intel Graphics annoying flickering/tearing

xf86-video-intel upgrade from 2.21.13 → 2.21.14 made my screen flicker, setting

Option "TearFree" "false"

in the X config file seems to fix that after short testing. I'm not sure, though.

You might want to read:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67823
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37686

My hardware: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Atom Processor D4xx/D5xx/N4xx/N5xx Integrated Graphics Controller (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

--merlin

BlissfulChoreography

Member

Registered: 2008-12-19

Posts: 7

Re: Acer TimelineU, Intel Graphics annoying flickering/tearing

Has there been any progress on this? I have similar hardware, namely M5-581TG-6666, and I experience the same issue. It is probably not an issue with xorg because the flicker persists even when I don't start my display manager (kdm), albeit seeming less frequently.

mrln0

Member

Registered: 2013-08-07

Posts: 8

Re: Acer TimelineU, Intel Graphics annoying flickering/tearing

There was a upgrade notice for xf86-video-intel (2.21.14-2 -> 2.21.15-1). This did work for me.

[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] >>> This driver now uses SNA as the default acceleration method. You can
[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET]     still fall back to UXA if you run into trouble. To do so, save a file
[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET]     with the following content as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf :
[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET]       Section "Device"
[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET]         Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET]         Driver      "intel"
[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET]         Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
[2013-08-26 08:28] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET]       EndSection

BlissfulChoreography

Member

Registered: 2008-12-19

Posts: 7

Re: Acer TimelineU, Intel Graphics annoying flickering/tearing

UXA doesn't change anything, and its in Linux for Workgroups (3.11) as well. I tried booting a livecd and the bug is there as well, and X is not even installed in that situation.