Arch Linux

Coya

Member

Registered: 2016-07-27

Posts: 9

[SOLVED] Compton version 3 + xl_glx_hybrid backend cause screen freeze

Hey,

my desktop computer has shown some strange behaviour. After repeatedly freezing yesterday (with everything still working just the screen frozen) which was fixed by just restarting, booting it up today gives a frozen screen immediately with only static being displayed (and sometimes my normal background image, with warped colors, flashing in). The problem is reproducible by switching to a different tty and using

startx.

My graphics card is an approximately 7 years old Radeon HD7950 and since everything (even the mouse display) is working I thought it might be driver related and saw that there was a mesa update I installed yesterday (along with a kernel update, but I don't think that's related). So I tried

sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/mesa-18.2.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

but rebooting after that didn't fix the problem. The Xorg log files also give no errors (EE). Any hints how to detect the problem or see whether it's a hardware failure are appreciated.

I am currently typing this message on my laptop so it is obviously a bit hard to post whole logs.

Edit: updated thread title to more accurately describe the problem, now that I know what exactly it was.

Last edited by Coya (2018-11-03 11:47:24)

mpan

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,210

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Compton version 3 + xl_glx_hybrid backend cause screen freeze

The general guidelines:

• You may post long logs on ptpb.pw, which is usable from command line:

  cat file | curl -F c=@- https://ptpb.pw/

  It also has a client in repos: pbpst. gist.github.com and bpaste.net are good paste services too. Do not paste very long logs here, and always paste logs in code tags.

• For troubleshooting, just after encountering the problem:

  journalctl -xb

  See if there is no errors there.

• If you are using some login manager, perhaps this is the failing component?

• While downgrading, consider either downgrading all or moving system back to specific date.

Last edited by mpan (2018-11-03 06:43:56)

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Sometimes I seem a bit harsh — don’t get offended too easily!

Coya

Member

Registered: 2016-07-27

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Compton version 3 + xl_glx_hybrid backend cause screen freeze

Thank you for that info! Resetting the system to the beginning of October has 'solved' the immediate problem. Once I find the time I will try to cherry-pick the packages to see which one broke the system and post results here. Just for your information I do not use a login manager and everything is based on i3 (which hasn't gotten an update since October).

mpan

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,210

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Compton version 3 + xl_glx_hybrid backend cause screen freeze

While i3 itself might not get any update, perhaps something that is called by one of its parts did. Especially true if you have compiled something on your own: a rebuild may be required.

The good part is that you have found the day at which it worked fine, so you are at most 4–5 boots from determining at which point the break occurs.

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Sometimes I seem a bit harsh — don’t get offended too easily!

Coya

Member

Registered: 2016-07-27

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Compton version 3 + xl_glx_hybrid backend cause screen freeze

And your premonition was right. It seems to be the new Compton version (2.0-2 to 3.x.x) on the 30th of October which breaks the setup right now and that is called by my i3 setup (conincidentally that is one of the only points where my setup on my PC differs from the laptop). Every other package is up-to-date and once I upgrade compton and reboot it shows the faulty behaviour. I'll try to see whether I can understand what exactly is going wrong.

Edit: should I maybe change the subject of the thread to reflect that?

Last edited by Coya (2018-11-03 11:30:42)

Coya

Member

Registered: 2016-07-27

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Compton version 3 + xl_glx_hybrid backend cause screen freeze

Okay, solved the issue. This goes back to an issue with mesa and compton earlier this year (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58012, thank god for me commenting the config file) which was easily 'fixed' by changing the rendering backend, i.e. calling

compton --backend xr_glx_hybrid -f

Calling this in a terminal now results in a spam of

glx_render(): Missing texture.
glx_render(): Missing texture.
glx_render(): Missing texture.
...

and the previously observed behaviour. Not sure what this is exactly caused by, but removing the backend option to the compton call fixes it, i.e. calling

compton -f

I feel like this is a bug, since the help page on compton still shows xr_glx_hybrid to be a valid backend. If anyone has any more insights, I'd be thankful (for the sake of knowing more about this, rather than me needing to use this backend, I frankly don't mind which one I'm using).

Last edited by Coya (2018-11-03 11:46:41)