Arch Linux

MHanson75

Member

Registered: 2023-05-31

Posts: 1

UI lag with any DE with compositing when connected to TV through HDMI

Greetings everyone,

I've recently installed a fresh install of Arch on a HP Pavillion dm4 with a missing screen, to use it I've connected it through VGA on a generic no-brand LCD television. Everything seemed to work fine, I managed to get Arch installed with xfce on here and got everything up and running, then moved the laptop to my room to connect it to my Sony Android TV through HDMI and that's when the problem appeared.

The second xfce loads, I get the craziest lags ever, the simple right click menu on the desktop takes about 5 seconds to fade in and 5 more to fade out when I click elsewhere, dragging open windows on the screen also lags a lot, and so does the contents of any window displayed. I tried plugging it back into my other TV but through HDMI this time and the same thing happened there, connected it through VGA and all lag was gone.
Now, for the HDMI display to even be detected in the first place, I've had to disable the (missing) built in display through KMS with

video=LVDS-1:d

otherwise, I'd never get to the tty in the first place.

I tried running a standalone Openbox session while connected through HDMI and that worked perfectly fine, up until I ran picom, then the lag issues appeared again. I switched back to xfce and ran

openbox --replace

in the terminal and there again, the lag issues were gone and everything worked smoothly. I used the same command to replace Openbox with Compiz and there again there was lag. Of course, disabling compositing through xfwm's settings also fixed the lag, but my end goal is to run Compiz with xfce, so compositing is kind of necessary.

I've read online that having xf86-video-intel present on the system could cause this issue, but after double checking I most definitely don't have that installed. The GPU on this thing is a 5000 series ATI Mobility Radeon HD and so I've installed the xf86-video-radeon driver as per the wiki page. Here's the output when I run

lspci -K | grep VGA
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
	Kernel driver in use: i915
	Kernel modules: i915
--
	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Thermal Subsystem
	Kernel driver in use: intel ips
	Kernel modules: intel_ips
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Park [Mobility Radeon HD 5430/5450/5470]
	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Park [Mobility Radeon HD 5430/5450/5470]
	Kernel driver in use: radeon
	Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu 

From what I understand, the driver is properly loaded by the kernel, so I really am at a loss here. Any help would be hugely appreciated!

Here are the laptop specs (taken from neofetch)
OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Host: HP Pavilion dm4 Notebook PC 058B11000024
Kernel: 6.3.5-arch1-1
Uptime: 47 mins
Packages: 619 (pacman)
Shell: bash 5.1.16
Resolution: 1360x768
DE: Xfce 4.18
WM: Openbox
WM Theme: Onyx-Citrus
Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3]
Icons: elementary [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3]
Terminal: alacritty
CPU: Intel i5 M 450 (4) @ 2.400GHz
GPU: Intel Core Processor
GPU: AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5430/5450/5470
Memory: 791MiB / 7743MiB