Arch Linux

markovial

Member

Registered: 2021-08-22

Posts: 14

[SOLVED] Screen Flicker / Blink : TUXEDO Infinity Book Pro 14

Hey ,

I was having troubles with getting my Tuxedo Infinity Book Pro 14 screen to work well with arch. Post install there was a lot of screen blinking , flickering , tearing mainly on mouse movement. The screen is a 3k display. I have the xf86-video-intel drivers installed.

I was using i3-gaps with lightdm and a picom / compton. To fix the issue based on various forum threads that I read , I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf with :

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "TearFree"    "true"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
EndSection

Which seemed to fix it , except that on higher resolution settings 2880x1800 90.00 , input keys would randomly double fire. As an example , mod+enter would sometimes open two terminals, mod+q (my key for quit/close) would close multiple windows , which as you can imagine was more than just a little bit annoying. In addition the screen would just seem laggy. This seemed to get fixed as soon as I switched the Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa" to Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna" , however the screen blinking , flickering would return. Basically it was a fight between uxa and lower resolution or sna and screen blinking. So I decided that for now I can live with lower resolution just to get the machine in a usable state.

I used xrandr to lower the refresh rate and resolution to 1920x1080 60. The following commands are not exact since this is a different machine and I cant log in to be able to post the og's

xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_60.00"  172.80  1920 2040 2248 2576  1080 1081 1084 1118  -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode eDP1 "1920x1080_60.00"
xrandr --output eDP1 --mode "1920x1080_60.00"

The commands were working , and I wanted to make the changes permanent on loading up of lightdm , since the double key fire + system screen lag that I mentioned earlier was also happening in lightdm , and would randomly double input keys while I was trying to put in my password (pretty maddening) . So to permanentize the settings I put the xrandr commands above into a script and added the following lines to /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf  :

[Seat:*]
display-setup-script=~/markov/Scripts/bash/lightdm_resolution_setup.sh

It is my understanding that the above script would run as root before lightdm starts up and that would have fixed all my problems by forcing the resolution I wanted with the intel driver settings I wanted.

Anyway, what happened is that now the after boot and my encrytion key check , when lightdm starts up I cannot see anything except a blinking cursor on screen. When I try Alt+Ctrl+F2 , I see tty login prompt for a second before the screen goes blank and cursor gets back again. So I cant even get into tty to try and log in to fix this situation.

I have the follwing packages as they relate to lightdm :

lightdm
lightdm-gtk-greeter
lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings
lightdm-webkit2-greeter
lightdm-webkit-theme-aether

I played around with the lightdm-webkit-theme-aether theme and with the laggy screen problems I mentioned earlier I got rid of it by running yay -R lightdm-webkit-theme-aether . I dont know if it requried deeper cleaning and that is what caused the problem.

I dont care about the data since it is a new machine , I dont mind formatting the drive and reinstalling arch again but the screen issues would remain the same ...

As additional notes , the machine came preinstalled with Tuxedo OS which is built in Ubunutu on another seperate m.2 drive. I have booted and played around in there and there are no screen tearing / resolution problems so I dont think that this is a issue with the hardware.

I also tried a different desktop environments (XFCE) from a bootable usb running manjaro , and the screen blinking on mouse movement was still there. I dont really want to be forced into using the pre installed ubuntu after 2 years of using arch so I really would like to get this fixed over just using the pre provided install.

Thank you for your help , and If you actually read all that.

--------------------

TLDR :

Two problems :
1. Cant log in / get into tty  ( I think because of faulty lightdm config that I edited  )
2. 3k screen on TUXEDO laptop has insane screen issues making it unusable ( I think because of intel driver / resolution issues )

Last edited by markovial (2021-08-23 18:43:17)

Bzzz_56

Member

Registered: 2021-05-14

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] Screen Flicker / Blink : TUXEDO Infinity Book Pro 14

I own a Lenovo laptop the YOGA 14s 2021 that has a same screen resolution and refresh rate, and the screen also flickers without turning off the intel panel self refresh. Turning off the intel PSR feature may solve the screen flickering issue for you.

markovial

Member

Registered: 2021-08-22

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Screen Flicker / Blink : TUXEDO Infinity Book Pro 14

can you let me know how I would go about disabling the intel panel self refresh on linux ?

markovial

Member

Registered: 2021-08-22

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Screen Flicker / Blink : TUXEDO Infinity Book Pro 14

I have managed to fix the tty issue. I basically went into the grub menu and edited the pre boot commands with init=/bin/bash , to get dropped into bash as root. Then editied the lightdm config commenting out the script line that was causing problems. So that's done.

As for the screen , another thing that I have noticed is that the screen issues presist even before I am in an X session (i.e) navigating around in tty by using ranger etc.. The screen does not refresh properly (is partially / completely black / displays static tearing) after key inputs and I usually need keep typing or move around using the arrow keys to cause it refresh into a new frame and display things. So far I have only tried editing the xorg / lightdm configs , but it seems like the issue runs deeper than that. Basically any time any movement is happening on screen , the panel cant handle it. If i have a firefox tab with some animation on it , the screen is basically just goes perma blank until I close the tab.

Last edited by markovial (2021-08-23 12:19:37)

Bzzz_56

Member

Registered: 2021-05-14

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] Screen Flicker / Blink : TUXEDO Infinity Book Pro 14

can you let me know how I would go about disabling the intel panel self refresh on linux ?

Using the kernel parameter

i915.enable_psr=0

as given in the archwiki page Screen flickering.

markovial

Member

Registered: 2021-08-22

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] Screen Flicker / Blink : TUXEDO Infinity Book Pro 14

Thanks for the wiki link. It seems like intel psr was exactly what was causing the problem. Everything seems to be working now.

For people who stumble upon this in the future , the solution is :

edit : /boot/grub/grub.cfg
append : i915.enable_psr=0
to the line that starts with : linux vmlinuz-linux ...

Ammako

Member

Registered: 2021-07-16

Posts: 267

Re: [SOLVED] Screen Flicker / Blink : TUXEDO Infinity Book Pro 14

I probably wouldn't recommend doing grub.cfg manually. It works, but grub-mkconfig will remove your edit if you ever have a reason to use it in the future. You're better off adding kernel parameters to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub and running grub-mkconfig.