Arch Linux

gegenschall

Member

From: Munich, Germany

Registered: 2013-10-09

Posts: 33

[solved] Screen corruptions, flashing and tearing since Xorg 1.16

Hi all,

I'm running into randomly but frequently occurring screen corruptions like flashing, tearing and artifacts since the update to Xorg 1.16. I can't say for sure if they started to occur on 1.16.0-6 or earlier.
The curruptions happen in every application, no matter what Display I'm using (tried LVDS and DVI).

I'm running the latest GNOME, Xorg and Kernel (_no_ testing packages). My /etc/environment contains the following lines:

CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling
CLUTTER_VBLANK=True

My /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf contains:

options i915 enable_rc6=7 lvds_downclock=1

I'm on a Lenovo Thinkpad X220, so my graphics card is an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000.

Any ideas on how to get rid of them, apart from downgrading to Xorg 1.15?

Cheers,
Max

Last edited by gegenschall (2014-08-18 10:19:48)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: [solved] Screen corruptions, flashing and tearing since Xorg 1.16

This might be the same thing a couple of us have seen (e.g. here) that the 1.16 update 'broke' sna and we had to switch to uxa.  I had *all sorts* of issues on my X200, I had even suspected my GPU was just dead.  But switching to uxa seems to have fixed everything.

EDIT: see the wiki on how to check.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-08-14 11:44:47)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

gegenschall

Member

From: Munich, Germany

Registered: 2013-10-09

Posts: 33

Re: [solved] Screen corruptions, flashing and tearing since Xorg 1.16

Well, I did that and it didn't really help. UXA is _a lot_ better but still flickering and displaying artifacts. Glamour is so slow I can brew a nice cup of coffee while the screen is being redrawn.

Last edited by gegenschall (2014-08-14 19:44:03)

bulletmark

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2013-10-22

Posts: 710

Re: [solved] Screen corruptions, flashing and tearing since Xorg 1.16

I had been using sna + TearFree but since xorg 1.16 I have been getting flickering. Trialing uxa, sna, and glamour, all with and without TearFree, I have found that glamour + TearFree is the only current combination that gives me smooth animation, no tearing, and no flickering. Note I am using GNOME3 desktop. I have never found any of those clutter env vars to make any difference to tearing etc.

PS: later edit 21-Aug-2014: To follow up on this, clutter updated from 1.18.2-1 -> 1.18.4-1 today so I tried the combinations again. The flickering seems gone so I have gone back to SNA + TearFree because it is the more "orthodox" configuration. I still need TearFree to get smooth window animation and the clutter env variables still don't make any difference.

Last edited by bulletmark (2014-08-21 04:06:37)

gegenschall

Member

From: Munich, Germany

Registered: 2013-10-09

Posts: 33

Re: [solved] Screen corruptions, flashing and tearing since Xorg 1.16

To revive this one more time:

There seems to be the same problem occuring for some Debian people here. I applied the patch, switched back to SNA and it seems to work.

I'm marking this as solved.