Arch Linux

krafczyk

Member

Registered: 2015-09-08

Posts: 37

Mouse flickering with Displaylink external monitor setup

I own a system76 bonobo extreme, which includes a Geforce 980M graphics card. I run the nvidia driver, and until recently, everything work perfectly.

My work setup includes two external monitors in addition to the laptop monitor. This means I'm utilizing the HDMI out and miniDP out.

I started having flickering issues with the miniDP output where occasionally the entire screen would glitch out then go blank for a few seconds before coming back. This worsened until the miniDP port was unusable. To try and compensate, I bought a displaylink USB3.0 -> Displayport adapter in hopes to still allow me to use a third monitor. Following the instructions here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DisplayLink I've been able to get the third monitor to work basically perfectly.

The only problem is, that my mouse cursor along with a small box around it flickers almost constantly. If I have my cursor near text I'm writing, the box often doesn't refresh leaving that part of the screen blank as I'm writing characters underneath. If I move my mouse it'll refresh and as long as the mouse isn't close to where I'm looking its not a problem.

I'm wondering whether there are any X settings I can tweak to solve this issue. I've followed the displaylink guide almost to the letter, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about X and video drivers to know whether changing /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-evdidevice.conf with additional or different options can do anything.

Based on some google searching, I feel like this is an issue people have with multiple GPUs, which I understand is basically what a DisplayLink device is.

Any help resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated!

krafczyk

Member

Registered: 2015-09-08

Posts: 37

Re: Mouse flickering with Displaylink external monitor setup

Some computer info:

uname -a
Linux Wagner 5.3.13-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun, 24 Nov 2019 10:15:50 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

nvidia-smi
Tue Dec  3 09:10:46 2019       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.36       Driver Version: 440.36       CUDA Version: 10.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 980M    Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   52C    P0    30W /  N/A |   7929MiB /  8118MiB |      5%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+