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Hi guys,
New arch user here but with quite a few years of gentoo daily usage. I have decided to switch to Atch and I am quite happy with the so far... however I am hitting a nagging problem which I did not see described anywhere in the forum (or in google search results).
Inside Gnome whenever I maximise a window, such as Firefox or Gedit or Nautilus, that frame (window) flickers constantly and sometimes simply goes blank (as in, totally white). The gnome shell top bar remains there all the time.
I can also see a few odd and interesitng behaviours.
1. this behavour does not occurr if the window is not maximised, even if it is resized manually to take all desktop space it does not flicker.
2. if I switch to the gnome dark theme (using the tweak tool) then the gnome native apps like Gedit and Nautilus no longer flicker, it all returns to normal
3. in gnome-terminal, and while using the white theme only the window top bar flickers, not the terminal are itself. Once again swithching to the dark theme solves the problem
4. I tried to do a screencast to better ilustrate the problem and to my desbelief when I played it back the flickers where not visible on the video even though I saw them while recording
My first reaction was to play around with the driver options and I tried pretty much everything including disabling hardware acceleration but it did not improve things.
I then installed another window and desktop manager. Openbox+LXDE, and I could not see the problem anymore. At this point I started to suspect that either gnome-shell or mutter (the window manager) were playing tricks so I launched a standalone mutter session (whithout gnome-shell) and put an xterm on it. If I maximise the xterm then the whole window (frame) goes blank... (same behaviour as seen above)
So I have a feeling it is the window manager but I am a bit stuck on what to do next to diagnose the actual problem. Mutter is pretty much locked up.
Has anyone came across this issue before?
A few details on my setup:
Asus Zenbook UX301 with an Intel Iris 5100 card
Kernel version: 3.15.7-1 (standard arch build)
And the graphics stack:
intel-dri 10.2.4-1
xf86-video-intel 2.99.914-1
xorg-server 1.16.0-5
gdm 3.12.2-1
mutter 3.12.2-1
gnome-shell 3.12.2-1
NOTE: I am running a "custom" version of cairo (compiled from their git repo) in order to take advantage of the recent HiDPI support in Gnome but I can tell this problem existed even without this custom versions, that is, while using the compiled version from extra.
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I've never seen this full screen app flickering before the last 2 days after xorg updated to 1.16. I have 2 large screens so the only app I use maximised is Google Chrome browser where I now see this new flicker issue.
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I confirm that google Chrome has this issue as well when maximised and in full screen mode. However, this was also happening for me before xorg 1.16.
I suspect this may be a compositing problem when Mutter runs on top of an X server using the Intel driver, and possibiy not affecting all graphic cards.
Unfortuantely I don't think there is any way of disabling compositing in Mutter or indeed do much in terms of configuration, I know this is by design but I think there are a minimum set of options which nevertheless should be available.
Would you be able to confirm what is your setup in terms of versions and graphic card?
Thanks
Last edited by cruzr (2014-07-31 10:41:34)
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Just tried Cinnamon and while the experience is slightly better the issue persists under certain circumstances, for example a Firefox maximised window will flicker while showing the arch web page, although funnily enough it won't if displaying google...
I know cinnamon uses Muffin a fork of Mutter so probably not the best alternative to try here...
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I am on a x86_64 box with 2 by 1920x1200 screens also using intel graphics with the same versions as all those you list. I am using SNA backend with the TearFree option. Without that option I get poor window animation and tearing on movement.
I have been overseas for 3 weeks before this week and definitely did not see it before then but you may be right that this started before xorg 1.16.
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I'm also getting weird short flashes that kinda look like tearing, but only after upgrade to xorg-server-1.16. It also doesn't happen constantly, but there's a flash every once in a while. Still it happens so rarely that it really doesn't bother me that much though.
I'm also not getting those with only full screen applications, instead the whole gnome shell would flash when you enable the activities view for example (I guess you could argue that the shell itself is a full screen window).
Switching acceleration method from SNA would probably help, but I haven't tested it properly, since with UXA or glamor I either get tearing or performance drop compared to SNA.
I'm not sure if this is the same issue that cruzr encountered, since I'm positive this didn't happen on xorg-server-1.15.* but thought I'd mention it anyway.
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RE: ooo
Yes I regonise those sporadic flashes. In fact, it all started out with those flashes once in a while, again on maximised windows mainly and then the flickering got more frequent, now being constant. Interesting that I saw some of these with xorg-server-1.15* as well.
I have tried playing around with the driver options, including switching to UXA or even disabling accelaration entirely and unfortunately it does not seem to help and of course you are right, there is a noticiable drop in performance compared to SNA.
At the moment, I am still running gnome shell with the dark theme which mitigates the problem... not sure why. However apps such as Firefox or Chrome are not affected by this "colour scheme change" and therefore continue with white title bars and displaying the problem.
I am surprised I don't see more users complaining about the problem since Intel cards are quite widespread these days. Perhaos we will see more as people ugrade to xorg 1.16
This probably does not affect all cards and potentially with different severities. The only other thing that may have an impact is resolution, I have a 2560x1440 display.
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