Arch Linux

ZingerZola

Member

Registered: 2024-03-16

Posts: 1

[SOLVED] screen tear - intel gen 13 - Hardware Acceleration

Hello,

I recently migrated my Arch Linux system from my Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 6 to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 11.
I did this by simply swapping the internal SSD containing my Arch setup to my new laptop.
While most things seem to be working smoothly, I've encountered a frustrating issue with Blink engine browsers.

Issue:

Upon launching Blink browsers like Chromium, Brave, and Google Chrome on my new laptop, I've noticed significant screen update issues. The browser fails to update the display properly; it essentially freezes until I switch to a different application and then return. Even upon returning, the screen remains static, essentially a snapshot showing what the browser contained at the moment I return to it, but then not updating anything afterwards.
I also have this screen tear on other applications such as: gnome-calculator and when watching video in mpv when its not in full screen.

Background Information:

Both laptops are equipped with Intel CPUs featuring integrated graphics, and I'm using the i3 window manager.
Notably, Firefox works flawlessly, and the issue seems to be with all Blink-based browsers and other random applications I use.

Output for (on new destination laptop)

lspci -k | grep -A 2 -i "VGA"

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04)
	Subsystem: Lenovo Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics]
	Kernel driver in use: i91

This resolved the issues I was having with lots of different software!

Output for

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "intel"
EndSection

Potentially relevant kernel command in

/etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 quiet intel_pstate=disable ibt=off"

Troubleshooting Attempts:

After some research, I stumbled upon a temporary workaround. Launching the affected browsers with the flag:

--disable-gpu

seems to alleviate the issue. However, this suggests that the problem might be related to hardware acceleration, or to the intel driver.

Request for Assistance:

While the workaround is functional, I'm eager to find a more permanent solution that allows me to utilize hardware acceleration with Blink engine browsers. If anyone has encountered a similar issue or has suggestions on how to troubleshoot further, I would greatly appreciate your input.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to look at my issue and for any help or suggestions you may have.

Solution:

After reading:

    Some (Debian & Ubuntu, Fedora, KDE, Mozilla) recommend not installing the xf86-video-intel driver, and instead falling back on the modesetting driver. See [1], [2], Xorg#Installation, and modesetting(4). However, the modesetting driver can cause problems such as screen tearing and mouse jittering on XFCE, artifacts when switching virtual desktops in Chromium, and vsync jitter/video stutter in mpv.
    The xf86-video-intel driver does not have proper support for Gen 11 and newer hardware, causing lack of acceleration and rendering issues that make Plasma Desktop almost unusable. See [3].
    There have been couple reports [4] [5] where the whole graphics stack hard freezes when xf86-video-intel is installed, not even switching to a different virtual console works (by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fn), only killing the user processes with SysRq works.

I switched the Driver to utilize "modesetting" by editing the config file:

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "modesetting"
EndSection

This resolved my issues and the software no longer screen tears.

Last edited by ZingerZola (2024-03-17 06:47:19)