Arch Linux

Firestar

Member

From: Beijing, China

Registered: 2021-07-19

Posts: 115

Website

My laptop screen occasionally flashes rapidly and displays artifacts

AMDGPU+Wayland

My laptop screen occasionally flashes rapidly and displays artifacts (horizontally), though it's difficult to reproduce.
I'm unsure what's causing this. My computer and operating system are as follows:

Operating System: Arch Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.22.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2
Kernel Version: 6.18.9-arch1-2 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 w/ Radeon 860M
Memory: 64 GiB of RAM (62.1 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon 860M Graphics
Manufacturer: HP
Product Name: HP ZHANX 14 G1a AI
System Version: SBKPFV3

1. My computer doesn't have X11
2. My computer has Windows, but I rarely use it. When I do use Windows, I've never experienced screen flickering. However, when using Linux, it happens about 1-2 times every day.

Last edited by Firestar (2026-02-13 14:11:49)

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Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,623

Re: My laptop screen occasionally flashes rapidly and displays artifacts

What's in the journal when this happens? dmesg?

Firestar

Member

From: Beijing, China

Registered: 2021-07-19

Posts: 115

Website

Re: My laptop screen occasionally flashes rapidly and displays artifacts

after I checked, I see dmesg and journalctl do not write down anything when this happens

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I asked ChatGPT and it gives me 4 possibilities:

1️⃣ PSR (Probability of Success)

Panel Self Refresh is a very common issue on RDNA3 + eDP.

Characteristics:

No logs

Instant screen flickering

Returns to normal

Unique to Linux

2️⃣ VRR / Adaptive Sync

Wayland + VRR may occasionally exhibit timing jitter.

3️⃣ DCN Power State Transition

When GPU/display clock transitions P-states:

Single-frame timing misalignment

Does not trigger an error

4️⃣ eDP Link Instant Retrain

If link quality is marginal:

Instantaneous artifacts may appear

May not log an error

Last edited by Firestar (2026-02-14 00:56:26)

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Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Firestar

Member

From: Beijing, China

Registered: 2021-07-19

Posts: 115

Website

Re: My laptop screen occasionally flashes rapidly and displays artifacts

My screen just flickered and I see this on journalctl:

Feb 14 10:04:05 HP64 kwin_wayland[1005]: atomic commit failed: Device or resource busy

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Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.