Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

Maverick89 · 2016-06-21 17:37:31

Hello,

probably since an update lately all the dark color on the display are a subject for a slight flickering, constantly getting darker and lighter. It's still readable, just changes what looks like the contrast - the lighter the color, the less affected it is. White places are unaffected. E.g. here on the arch forum I see the header of my Firefox window and the "archlinux" header of the website flicker, the text entry window slightly flicker and the white background is fine, The effect already starts in SDDM.

Even more weirdly if I turn a video on, e.g. opening youtube video just in a part of the screen,m the flicker completely (!) disappears throughout the whole screen.

I've tried rolling back xf86-video-intel, which didn't help anything, dmesg doesn't show anything interesting, no idea what else to do...

Also, the KDE clock applet has stopped updating at the same update (just in case it might be related).

Running latest plasma (with default effects) on X on a Haswell laptop (Thinkpad L540).

~ % uname -a
Linux MavsSchleppi 4.6.2-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jun 8 08:40:59 CEST 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux


~ % hwinfo --gfxcard
07: PCI 02.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)              
  [Created at pci.366]
  Unique ID: _Znp.qOKKWvSA3S5
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0
  SysFS BusID: 0000:00:02.0
  Hardware Class: graphics card
  Model: "Intel 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller"
  Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
  Device: pci 0x0416 "4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller"
  SubVendor: pci 0x17aa "Lenovo"
  SubDevice: pci 0x501e 
  Revision: 0x06
  Driver: "i915"
  Driver Modules: "drm"
  Memory Range: 0xf0000000-0xf03fffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xe0000000-0xefffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  I/O Ports: 0x5000-0x503f (rw)
  Memory Range: 0x000c0000-0x000dffff (rw,non-prefetchable,disabled)
  IRQ: 24 (80069 events)
  Module Alias: "pci:v00008086d00000416sv000017AAsd0000501Ebc03sc00i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: i915 is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe i915"
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown

Primary display adapter: #7

EDIT:
- switching to UXA over SNA in xorg config didn't have any effect
- just realized it's not just the clock freozen, it's the whole taskbar

EDIT 2:
- Same kind of flicker is present in GNOME and Plasma-Wayland.

Last edited by Maverick89 (2016-06-22 22:13:05)

Biont · 2016-06-23 05:23:41

I'm experiencing the exact same issue and it's slowly driving me insane. Appeared 1-2 weeks ago after some update. I was hoping it would go away quickly with another update but I'm beginning to lose confidence.
Thanks to your tip, I am now keeping a video looping in the background. I'm willing to try anything that could help get this sorted out.

It might be worth pointing out that the flickering *only* affects the internal monitor of my Lenovo E540. My secondary monitor works just fine.

08: PCI 02.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)              
  [Created at pci.366]
  Unique ID: _Znp.0pNVjsEQbk0
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0
  SysFS BusID: 0000:00:02.0
  Hardware Class: graphics card
  Model: "Intel 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller"
  Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
  Device: pci 0x0416 "4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller"
  SubVendor: pci 0x17aa "Lenovo"                                                                                     
  SubDevice: pci 0x502a                                                                                              
  Revision: 0x06                                                                                                     
  Driver: "i915"                                                                                                     
  Driver Modules: "drm"                                                                                              
  Memory Range: 0xf1000000-0xf13fffff (rw,non-prefetchable)                                                          
  Memory Range: 0xe0000000-0xefffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)                                                          
  I/O Ports: 0x6000-0x603f (rw)                                                                                      
  Memory Range: 0x000c0000-0x000dffff (rw,non-prefetchable,disabled)                                                 
  IRQ: 31 (242976 events)                                                                                            
  I/O Port: 0x00 (rw)                                                                                                
  Module Alias: "pci:v00008086d00000416sv000017AAsd0000502Abc03sc00i00"                                              
  Driver Info #0:                                                                                                    
    Driver Status: i915 is active                                                                                    
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe i915"                                                                           
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown                                                         
                                                                                                                     
21: PCI 100.0: 0302 3D controller                                                                                    
  [Created at pci.366]                                                                                               
  Unique ID: VCu0.V4CZ4lJMsq6                                                                                        
  Parent ID: vSkL.OF6Z2DnKUl6                                                                                        
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0                                                            
  SysFS BusID: 0000:01:00.0                                                                                          
  Hardware Class: graphics card                                                                                      
  Model: "nVidia GK208M [GeForce GT 740M]"                                                                           
  Vendor: pci 0x10de "nVidia Corporation"                                                                            
  Device: pci 0x1292 "GK208M [GeForce GT 740M]"                                                                      
  SubVendor: pci 0x17aa "Lenovo"                                                                                     
  SubDevice: pci 0x502a                                                                                              
  Revision: 0xa1                                                                                                     
  Driver: "nouveau"                                                                                                  
  Driver Modules: "drm"
  Memory Range: 0xf0000000-0xf0ffffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xc0000000-0xcfffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xd0000000-0xd1ffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  I/O Ports: 0x5000-0x507f (rw)
  IRQ: 30 (22 events)
  Module Alias: "pci:v000010DEd00001292sv000017AAsd0000502Abc03sc02i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: nouveau is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe nouveau"
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
  Attached to: #7 (PCI bridge)

Primary display adapter: #8

Maverick89 · 2016-06-24 20:31:03

BTW If I turn the brightness high all the way and look carefully, I see it's actually a pattern of grey dots or something like that overlaying the actual picture.
I've checked the update logs and there doesn't seem to be anything video-related there but xf86-video-intel. No kernel or something...

Did you do any downgrades to identify the packet? Would be nice to find the source to report the bug to the right guys but I'm not too familar with the grafics subsystem for an educated guess=(

EDIT: just in case, you can see the upgraded packets in /var/log/pacman.log and grep it by date.

Last edited by Maverick89 (2016-06-24 20:32:00)

Kkiro · 2016-06-25 03:08:37

I had exactly same problem on Linux 4.6.2, and downgrading kernel version worked. (4.6.2 -> 4.5.4)
Latest version of xf86-video-intel doesn't seem to have any problem.

I think this is a problem with DRM/i195 kernel module.

FYI, I'm using MSI GE60 2PE laptop (Haswell i7-4720HQ, NVIDIA GTX 860M)

Last edited by Kkiro (2016-06-25 03:13:14)

dice · 2016-06-29 18:31:43

Hi, I've got an issue with my screen backlight flickering on my Lenovo E540(intel haswell, Nvidia turned off via bumblebee/bbswitch). Though I am not entirely sure if it is really the backlight. It might also be some rendering issue but it is only affecting the brightness/color of the screen. I don't have any geometrical errors.
This happens since kernel 4.6.2 and also persists with kernel 4.6.3. Using the LTS-kernel everything is fine.
I was following this thread about screen freezes since 4.6.2 because I thought it might be related. I used the lts-kernel for now and hoped the issue would magically disappear with 4.6.3...it didn't. As people in this thread report their issue fixed since 4.6.3 I suspect I have some different issue.
Forum search leads to a few more threads reporting similar problems lately (here and here). I don't know if we have the same issue, the description varies somehow and both of them seem to have far worse issues.

The flickering itself varies in intensity. Sometimes it just flickers once every couple of seconds but there are also periods where it is flickering rapidly for some time. It immediately stops when switching to a TTY. It also gets better if I turn the brightness down. Though I don't know if it is flickering less or the change in brightness is just not as perceivable as the screen is dark anyway.

Journalctl shows nothing suspicious. I have tried switching the intel acceleration method but no difference for uxa or sna.
Does anybody have similar issues, some hints on how to investigate this further?

Biont · 2016-06-30 07:39:53

I can confirm that downgrading to kernel 4.5.4 works.

The last update for xf86-video-intel on my machine did not have any effect, though. That's why I tried the kernel downgrade in the first place

Last edited by Biont (2016-06-30 07:41:04)

Dieter@be · 2016-07-03 19:12:55

dell m6800 user here, which also has an intel video card.
saw similar symptoms as described, switching to an i3 tab with a video playing supressed the issue (though i noticed the video playback of the video was very stuttery), switching to another tab would trigger the flickering and visual artifacts on the top edge of the display.

i tried downgrading to xf86-video-intel-1:2.99.917+654+ga508b11-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz, warm reboot and shutdown + boot, to no avail.
then downgrade linux (i also did linux-headers just to be sure) to 4.5.4-1 fixed it after a reboot. no more artifacts, flickering, and smooth youtube playback.

kolorafa · 2016-07-06 17:21:41

I have the exact thing, what i did observe was:

It flicker a lot when the system is starting, when it's done loading it flicker less, sometimes few min without flickering but it randomly comes back but less intensive.
I use dualboot with windows, windows doesn't have that problem BUT.

When i did use linux, it did start flicker, and i did reboot into windows, it was still flickering on tty, grub even in windows loading animation, it stopped when windows load the graphic drivers.

It also only flickers on laptop screen, external screens are not affected.

Changing the brighness does change the brightness but still flicker the same.

-------------
Does anyone have any way to debug it?
How to downgrade kernel to 4.6.1 or later to temporary bypass the problem as it's really hard to use ..

I know i should be able to use PKGBUILD from linux and downgrade the kernel, but maybe someone know how to do that easier.
I don't want to leave antergos because of flickering screen problem

-------------
MSI GE72 2QC Apache
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5700HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Broadwell-U Integrated Graphics (rev 0a)
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M] (rev a2)

Last edited by kolorafa (2016-07-06 17:27:29)

jtorbicki · 2016-07-27 18:19:28

I have exactly same problem on MSI GE62 2QL Apache. What I've managed to observe is that if I "stress" my laptop a bit - for instance by opening any web page with canvas animation (youtube is fine, just be sure the movie is playing) - the flickering is gone. This is not very convenient workaround though.

jtorbicki · 2016-07-27 19:17:59

I can confirm what I've found here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214032 that downgrading kernel to 4.5.4-1 got rid of the flickering.

dice · 2016-07-30 16:49:37

The video playback behavior was new to me but I can confirm it and also people in the other thread mention this. Thanks for the hint t that thread.

WorMzy · 2016-07-30 19:18:08

Mod note: moving to Laptop issues and merging with another thread with what appears to be the same issue.

Other topic title was: "Backlight flickering since kernel 4.6.2"

dice · 2016-08-02 20:59:13

I've found that adding i915.enable_psr=0 to my kernel parameters seems to solve the issue.
This disables PSR (Panel Self Refresh) which was enabled by default on recent kernels and was disabled on older kernels.

I found out about this option in a bug report (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95176#c28).

levy_pl · 2016-08-12 05:49:45

dice wrote:

I've found that adding i915.enable_psr=0 to my kernel parameters seems to solve the issue.
This disables PSR (Panel Self Refresh) which was enabled by default on recent kernels and was disabled on older kernels.
I found out about this option in a bug report (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95176#c28).

MSI GE70 2PE user here -with system up to date (kernel 4.7.0 and xf86-video-intel drivers) - this solution works! thank you very much

Biont · 2016-08-12 07:28:14

dice wrote:

I've found that adding i915.enable_psr=0 to my kernel parameters seems to solve the issue.

Thank you very much, it seems to fix the issue for me as well

guggi · 2016-08-17 09:51:33

Im running a DELL XPS L322X with linux 4.7.0-1

/etc/modprobe.d/i915
options i915 modeset=1
options i915 enable_psr=0

Disabling psr had no effect, flickering is still present.
Downgraded Kernel too version 4.6.4-1 for now.

Edit: Just gave 4.8.0-rc2-mainline a try, flickering is still present.

Last edited by guggi (2016-08-17 12:25:17)

dice · 2016-08-18 10:19:14

Did you try setting as parameter on the kernel cmdline? Although this should not make a difference...

If kernel 4.6.4 works for you it might be another issue because psr is also enabled per default in this kernel.

guggi · 2016-08-18 20:57:16

I tried both kernal and module parameters and as you gessed it makes no difference.

Last edited by guggi (2016-08-18 20:57:51)

Sadface · 2016-09-24 04:39:30

I can confirm that the DELL XPS L322X is entirely unimpressed by i915.enable_psr=0 and will happily continue on flickering. Downgrading to 4.5.4-1 fixes this.

I noticed /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight changed to /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0 when I downgraded, so whatever Intel are doing in their new driver, this model does not like it one bit.

Seems like putting the kernel on pacman's ignore list is the best fix for now.

Last edited by Sadface (2016-09-24 04:47:29)

guggi · 2016-10-01 09:44:22

just upgraded the kernel, seem to be fixed in 4.7.5-1-ARCH.

cheers

Shawn8901 · 2016-10-02 14:09:32

Great to hear thats fixed for you, but for me it seems that its only fixed partial.

For me running on 4.7.5-1 with an MSI GE70 2PC got still flickering on default setup.
If with disabled psr via "options i915 enable_psr=0" on modprobe line everything runs fine.

while flickering the active bit of /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_edp_psr_status is all time switching between on and off, which seems for me thats flickering for a refresh cycle.

Last edited by Shawn8901 (2016-10-02 14:12:14)

Dieter@be · 2016-10-03 12:53:54

same on my dell m6800. still needs i915.enable_psr=0 in syslinux.cfg even with 4.7.5-1-ARCH, otherwise crazy flickering.

YourAllah · 2016-11-16 16:16:45

Setting kernel parameter i915.enable_psr=0 helped me as well. Many thanks!
FYI,
Laptop: MSI GE70 2QE Apache Pro
Kernel: 4.8.8-1-ARCH

whitelynx · 2016-12-30 05:42:37

Setting

i915.enable_psr=0

fixed the issue for me too!

Laptop: Lenovo IdeaPad U530 Touch
Kernel: 4.8.11-rt7-2-rt

Arch Linux

#1 2016-06-21 17:37:31

Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#2 2016-06-23 05:23:41

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#3 2016-06-24 20:31:03

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#4 2016-06-25 03:08:37

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#5 2016-06-29 18:31:43

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#6 2016-06-30 07:39:53

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#7 2016-07-03 19:12:55

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#8 2016-07-06 17:21:41

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#9 2016-07-27 18:19:28

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#10 2016-07-27 19:17:59

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#11 2016-07-30 16:49:37

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#12 2016-07-30 19:18:08

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#13 2016-08-02 20:59:13

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#14 2016-08-12 05:49:45

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#15 2016-08-12 07:28:14

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#16 2016-08-17 09:51:33

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#17 2016-08-18 10:19:14

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#18 2016-08-18 20:57:16

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#19 2016-09-24 04:39:30

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#20 2016-10-01 09:44:22

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#21 2016-10-02 14:09:32

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#22 2016-10-03 12:53:54

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#23 2016-11-16 16:16:45

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

#24 2016-12-30 05:42:37

Re: Weird contrast flickering in desktop and sddm when no video playback

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