[Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

Lightningx10 · 2018-12-16 06:17:09

I have been attempting to install and run Arch on my Lenovo Thinkpad X220i with a 2nd Gen i3 2350M and HD Graphics 3000.

Installation has been as flawless as every other device I've installed on, however upon loading into a GUI environment for more than 10 Minutes extreme artifacting became apparent to me.

It is usually drawn whilst a window is moving or giving an animation and can also corrupt text in context menus and panels.

These artifacts have been observed under both KDE and Gnome on both Wayland and Xorg. I have basically tried every combination of drivers, uninstalling xf86-video-intel and it still appears.

This shouldn't be a hardware problem as windows 7 and windows 10 both work fine.

There is no easy way of triggering the artifacts, but once they start they only get worse. They can trigger in a variety of situations, and it is not dependent on load or RAM usage. I also switched ram kits to a set I know works fine and there is still artifacting.

Here is the output of lspci | grep -e VGA -e 3D:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)

Not sure if that helps.

If there are any logs or command outputs I should put in please say because I'm not sure what's relevant.

I would like to know if possible what's causing this so any help is appreciated.

Here are some example shots, this is only minor compared to the worst:
https://imgur.com/a/EewW8Wk
https://imgur.com/a/hOyYHCV
https://imgur.com/a/mI2N1uW

An example of bad artifacts (computer freshly restarted):
https://imgur.com/a/CjVTZ8y

Last edited by Lightningx10 (2019-01-16 06:11:29)

seth · 2018-12-16 08:37:00

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/In … nd/resume) ?

Lightningx10 · 2018-12-16 09:07:24

to be clear, this happens without putting the computer to sleep. That image of the lock screen was just an example, the other images where taken before the computer was put to sleep.

Lightningx10 · 2018-12-16 09:26:55

also just an update, while trawling through the Xorg rendering settings I changed the rendering method to be 'uxa' instead of 'sna' and it made the corruption worse.

seth · 2018-12-16 12:57:00

Did you try exporting that variable? (I'm not sure w/ the S3 is significant or -still- the only trigger)

Lightningx10 · 2018-12-16 23:38:44

I did try appending that line to my /etc/environment and the artifacting hasn't stopped, I also tried everything in the intel graphics section to fix the artifacting.

Lightningx10 · 2018-12-22 06:37:07

If anyone could help with this It'd be much appreciated. Upon tinkering further I have confirmed that this is definitely a problem with my compositor. When artifacting occurs, I simply disable compositing to fix the issues, turning compositing back on usually results in the artifacting reappearing if done within minutes of one of these artifacting bursts, but waiting around half an hour usually gives it time to settle back down. Anyone have any idea what desktop effect could be doing this? I've been tinkering around with different effects, changing OpenGL versions, and changing composition method. Again this is under KDE Plasma 5 desktop with xf86-video-intel enabled. Here is my 20-intel-conf file

 Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "DRI"    "3"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna"
   Option      "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

UPDATE: There is still graphical artifacting appearing in text and small images with the compositor disabled by hitting alt+shift+f12. I am at a loss as to what could be causing this.

Last edited by Lightningx10 (2018-12-22 06:54:23)

Lightningx10 · 2019-01-06 09:30:41

Please this issue is absolutely infuriating. I'm forced to primarily use windows to avoid this artifacting because it appears under every Linux distribution I've tried. The artifacting still appears but is less noticeable with the compositor turned off. I am typing this from the 3rd re-install of arch, trying different DEs did not help so I've reverted back to the original post. I'm beginning to believe that this is a hardware issue, but using windows for hours and leaving it on is still yet to produce artifacting.

I'm happy to give more logs and information but I need to know what to type. Please any ideas would be appreciated, I can't stand using windows for anything more than office usually so this is infuriating.

To summarize for those who don't want to read every post here (can't blame you) I have configured 20-intel.conf in every possible way to attempt to fix the artifacting, changing accelmethod to uxa doesn't fix the issue and SNA set to 2 pretty much renders KDE unusable.

seth · 2019-01-06 09:36:39

Did you try using the modesetting driver (ie. uninstall xf86-vide-intel, be sure the 20-intel-conf is gone as well (that's btw. hopefully a typo, should be "20-intel.conf"))?

Lightningx10 · 2019-01-08 09:13:27

Yeah I just tried that, and it made the artifacting worse by far. Every icon loaded as a brown square and then after being manipulated into reloading disappeared as if completely transparent. Re-installed xf86-video-intel and it's gotten slightly better.

I don't know why but the artifacting comes in spurts. I have to say it's looking like a definate hardware problem, but it still baffles me why it doesn't appear under Windows at all.

seth · 2019-01-08 10:09:39

So it's rather the kernel module, let's see the current config:

systool -vm i915

Lightningx10 · 2019-01-08 10:41:10

Thank you so much again for your help, here is the output of that command if any of this helps:

Module = "i915"

  Attributes:
    coresize            = "2109440"
    initsize            = "0"
    initstate           = "live"
    refcnt              = "25"
    srcversion          = "FD6C46D2F6FA195D1202E00"
    taint               = ""
    uevent              = <store method only>

  Parameters:
    enable_hangcheck    = "Y"

  Sections:

Just out of interest, which Attributes are useful for this sort of troubleshooting? eg. is

 uevent = <store method only>

a relevant thing that I can modify, would it change a rendering method?

Again many thanks, it is really appreciated.

seth · 2019-01-08 14:08:52

Great, virtually no parameter output… try passing

i915.enable_dc=0 i915.enable_fbc= i915.enable_psr=0 intel_idle.max_cstate=1

to the kernel commandline.

Also (because of "windows"), see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Du … t_Start-Up

Lightningx10 · 2019-01-08 15:16:58

Ok so I wasn't 100% sure what you wanted me to do so here's what I've done.

I appended the following lines to the Kernel Parameters (Because the only instances I could find of this command line where referring to how Linux is started.

i915.enable_dc=0
i915.enable_fbc=0 (Assumed there was a typo here)
i915.enable_psr=0
intel_idle.max_cstate=1

Starting the computer up after this resulted in the same luck with artifacting, if not worse. I don't know why but i sometimes have streaks of hours without a single artifact, but then I open the KDE menu and half the screen looks like an old atari game. I am nearly certain this is a hardware bug but again I hate to repeat myself, nothing strange appears under windows.

In terms of hardware debugging, I've swapped ram for known working sets, tried both ram slots individually in every combination of ram I have. At one point I thought it might have been related to the connected AC adapter, but artifacting occurs on battery now that I received the battery. I've blown out the laptop for dust. Completely reinstalled OS on multiple drives in multiple drive slots, currently it's running on an MSATA SSD, but it's been on a regular SATA HDD in both UEFI on GPT, and BIOS on MBR.

also something I probably should've added earlier, I've also been experiences startups where network manager attempts to initialize the wifi card and fails, on the retry the card simply locks itself off on 1/2 occasions meaning half the time I turn on my computer there is no networking. Initially I thought this was unrelated, but I've seen severe artifacting occurring around a similar time to the failure to initialize (The only received error I get is that no secrets where entered even though there are no secrets).

Thank you again so much, I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to deal with people like me and problems like this and the fact that you're even trying makes me very happy to be trying my hardest to help this community.

Lightningx10 · 2019-01-09 00:31:41

So after adding those parameters here is the output of

 systool -vm i915

Module = "i915"

  Attributes:
    coresize            = "2109440"
    initsize            = "0"
    initstate           = "live"
    refcnt              = "22"
    srcversion          = "FD6C46D2F6FA195D1202E00"
    taint               = ""
    uevent              = <store method only>

  Parameters:
    enable_hangcheck    = "Y"

  Sections:

It looks fairly identical, is there meant to be more parameters under the 'Parameters:' section?

Also about that windows thing, I'm running windows 7 and I had no trouble setting up grub, but thanks anyway for the concern

Last edited by Lightningx10 (2019-01-09 01:19:20)

Lightningx10 · 2019-01-10 13:43:40

alright, I've basically decided to give up at this point. Every linux distro produces artifacting and I don't think applying any kernel parameters or settings will fix it. My best guess is that this is a hardware issue with ram, but its just too minute and in a different section to the section that windows uses for graphics. I will keep the arch install alongside my windows install, but it's unusable. FYI I applied those parameters to /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf and still no difference in artifacting.

For those who may encounter this problem in the future, my particular artifacting turns text and icons into brown pixel blobs under modesetting. With xf86-video-intel things get redrawn/recoloured darker/lighter in a flickering pattern on a regular basis, icons only very occasionally artifact, and text commonly turns into lines or just disappears. Occasionally in any of these settings the entire screen will just turn into a big corrupted mess. If you are having any of these problems feel free to contribute here please, because I have lost all hope at this point.

Again thanks to seth for your help, if you have any more ideas feel free to share them.

Lightningx10 · 2019-01-13 05:35:12

Ok so I switched to another distro on linux kernal 4.15.0, and I still have KDE Plasma 5 with all the same settings. There is no artifacting to speak of.

It's quite surprising. This distro appears to have assigned MESA drivers to my Intel Graphics.

I still really want to use arch linux, however becuase I can't identify the problem I'm forced to use this distro, so I'll just have to deal with the slow and clunky package manager.

seth · 2019-01-13 08:48:00

This distro appears to have assigned MESA drivers to my Intel Graphics.

There's no "MESA driver", mesa provides an OpenGL implementation - the one used by intel chips on all distros.

To make an informed statement, one would require to know the actual distro (to see kernel patches & config alterations) and comparing dmesg outputs.
Also of course try to downgrade the kernel, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Do … the_kernel - you should be able to install a 4.14 series LTS kernel from the archives in parallel to the main kernel w/o any pain.

Please remove the "[closed]" part of the subject, threads are closed by maintainers (and turned read only) - rather use "abandoned" or so.

Arch Linux

#1 2018-12-16 06:17:09

[Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#2 2018-12-16 08:37:00

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#3 2018-12-16 09:07:24

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#4 2018-12-16 09:26:55

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#5 2018-12-16 12:57:00

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#6 2018-12-16 23:38:44

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#7 2018-12-22 06:37:07

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#8 2019-01-06 09:30:41

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#9 2019-01-06 09:36:39

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#10 2019-01-08 09:13:27

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#11 2019-01-08 10:09:39

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#12 2019-01-08 10:41:10

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#13 2019-01-08 14:08:52

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#14 2019-01-08 15:16:58

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#15 2019-01-09 00:31:41

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#16 2019-01-10 13:43:40

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#17 2019-01-13 05:35:12

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

#18 2019-01-13 08:48:00

Re: [Abandoned] Artifacting under both xorg and wayland on Thinkpad X220i

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