Arch Linux

king.flasher.dave

Member

From: Berlin

Registered: 2008-11-25

Posts: 140

Website

[SOLVED] i915 X multi-monitor setup broken for qtile/awesome

I have an ongoing and very annoying issue with multi-monitor setups, when using qtile or awesome wm on my Lenovo X220.
Both are unable to use the external screens correctly.
You can find more infos and screenshots on the topic here:
https://github.com/qtile/qtile/issues/1041

Basically what this boils down to is a graphical glitch, in which the internal screen is mapped to the top left of the external, rendering the window manager unable to use the whole size of internal and external screen (or only external).

This makes multi-monitor practically unusable when using qtile or awesome. Interestingly enough xfce does not have that issue.
All environments are started with lightdm (have also unsuccessfully tested with gdm).

Maybe someone is experiencing similar issues or might know where to direct my attention?

Last edited by king.flasher.dave (2017-04-25 13:28:47)

---

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.

king.flasher.dave

Member

From: Berlin

Registered: 2008-11-25

Posts: 140

Website

Re: [SOLVED] i915 X multi-monitor setup broken for qtile/awesome

As mentioned in the bug report, this seems to be a driver/hardware issue.
When using uxa instead of sna (by now the default for i915), qtile and awesome behave correctly.
This is the

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

I now use:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "intel"
  Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection

This also makes lightdm/gdm extend to the external screen instead of (badly) duplicating it.
What I still can't figure out is, how xfce manages to not break in such a setup using sna...

---

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.