Font rendering in GTK

adamflott · 2014-11-01 01:22:50

I am having sporadic font issues with GTK applications. Example:

http://i.imgur.com/wJa2839.jpg

There is no identifyable trigger, but it appears to be universal (e.g. pidgin is currently displaying the same types of black boxes). Additionally, in GTK lists, some items disappear (e.g. some of my folder names in Sylpheed go missing) until I move the cursor and trigger some sort of tooltip.

I'm running the Enlightenment desktop from the official packages and no other obvious potential patches / apps that I can investigate.

21:14:50(Fri!) an ~> locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

-- mod edit: converted oversized image to url. Trilby --

Last edited by Trilby (2014-11-01 02:14:20)

colegui · 2014-11-01 06:13:43

Hello, a few weeks ago I installed kde and when I open firefox- only occurs in firefox ( no google-chrome)- this happens to me in some characters::

At first I thought it was a matter of rendering fonts, I have installed infinality-bundle, I made a comment in the thread bohoomil:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162098&p=57

..... this told me that he believed that this is issue drivers not rendering fonts ... I do not know exactly why this problem occurs , it may be a problem of firefox with drivers "mesa" (Open Source Drivers) .

My graphic card and drivers card is:

[hector@archkde ~]$ inxi -Gx
Graphics:  Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Bonaire XTX [Radeon R7 260X]
           bus-ID: 01:00.0
           Display Server: X.Org 1.16.1 drivers: ati,radeon Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
           GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD BONAIRE
           GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 10.3.2 Direct Rendering: Yes

I try dissabiling "Hardware Aceleration" in Firefox and customize the values to graphic card (20-radeon.conf).. but unfortunately this did not work ...

Note: I think most cases occurs :

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=189180

Best Regards.

Last edited by colegui (2014-11-01 06:27:48)

jschuster · 2014-11-04 14:34:50

I'm seeing a similar issue: http://imgur.com/crvPOM6

This happens periodically, but I don't know any particular way to reproduce it. Every time it does, every instance of a character in the window (e..g "a" in the image linked above) is rendered strangely, but it's a different character every time.

adamflott, are you also using an ATI graphics card? If so, what driver are you using? My hunch is this is a problem with the xf86-video-ati driver. Here's my card, from the lspci listing:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Oland [Radeon HD 8570 / R7 240 OEM]

I'll try catalyst and report back.

EDIT: fixed name of driver

EDIT: I forgot to add, I suspect the driver for two reasons: (1) this seemed to start around when I did a package update that included the ati driver, and (2) every few minutes, I get an error like the following in my logs:

Nov 04 09:35:13 blackrock kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: Packet0 not allowed!

Last edited by jschuster (2014-11-04 14:40:12)

skottish · 2014-11-04 15:45:22

The font corruption issue has been a problem with radeon drivers for a long time and it's more widespread than simply GTK, firefox, or any tool kit. I see it happen in urxvt and xmobar as well. It's known upstream.

The 'Packet0' problem is also known upstream. There seems to be some sort of memory corruption. Search for that error to find information. It's unclear to me whether the two problems are related. I thought that they may be for a while, but I'm not sure if that's the case.

Last edited by skottish (2014-11-04 15:48:52)

adamflott · 2014-11-04 16:14:27

jschuster wrote:

adamflott, are you also using an ATI graphics card? If so, what driver are you using? My hunch is this is a problem with the xf86-video-ati driver. Here's my card, from the lspci listing:

Graphics:  Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Tahiti XT [Radeon HD 7970/8970 OEM / R9 280X] bus-ID: 01:00.0
           Display Server: X.Org 1.16.1 driver: radeon Resolution: 3840x2160@60.00hz
           GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD TAHITI GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 10.3.2 Direct Rendering: Yes

As skottish pointed out, it looks like they are actively working on it. See https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kerne … drm/radeon

Fingers crossed 3.18 fixes this.

jschuster · 2014-11-04 16:17:59

Hmm, okay. I also just posted a bug to xorg before seeing these replies: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85864

It's strange that it only happened in the most recent driver update, though. Installing catalyst looked to be more trouble than it was worth for me, so I downgraded xf86-video-ati to 1:7.4.0-3, and so far that seems to have done the trick.

adamflott · 2014-11-27 01:03:46

I've been testing out the release candidates for 3.18.0 of the kernel, rc6 is the first version that I haven't seen any of the font rendering corruption nor had any crashes after a day and a half. Looking better.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-11-01 01:22:50

Font rendering in GTK

#2 2014-11-01 06:13:43

Re: Font rendering in GTK

#3 2014-11-04 14:34:50

Re: Font rendering in GTK

#4 2014-11-04 15:45:22

Re: Font rendering in GTK

#5 2014-11-04 16:14:27

Re: Font rendering in GTK

#6 2014-11-04 16:17:59

Re: Font rendering in GTK

#7 2014-11-27 01:03:46

Re: Font rendering in GTK

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