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lainlover

Member

Registered: 2024-04-01

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

This is an issue that I started having after running a system upgrade a few days ago. For the record, this is an NVIDIA RTX 3060Ti and I'm running KDE (with wayland) - both nvidia drivers and kde were upgraded.

> $ pacman -Qi nvidia kded wayland | awk '/^Name/ || /^Version/ || /^\w+ Date/ || /^Provides/ || /^Depends On/ || /^$/'
Name            : nvidia
Version         : 550.67-3
Provides        : NVIDIA-MODULE
Depends On      : linux  nvidia-utils=550.67  libglvnd
Build Date      : qui 28 mar 2024 17:30:32
Install Date    : seg 01 abr 2024 12:01:46

Name            : kded
Version         : 6.0.0-1
Provides        : None
Depends On      : gcc-libs  glibc  kconfig  kcoreaddons  kcrash  kdbusaddons  kservice  qt6-base
Build Date      : qua 21 fev 2024 14:07:35
Install Date    : seg 01 abr 2024 12:01:43

Name            : wayland
Version         : 1.22.0-1
Provides        : libwayland-client.so=0-64  libwayland-cursor.so=0-64  libwayland-egl.so=1-64  libwayland-server.so=0-64
Depends On      : glibc  libffi  expat  libxml2  default-cursors
Build Date      : qui 06 abr 2023 19:29:46
Install Date    : sáb 12 ago 2023 02:23:20

Initially, the first outcome was that I would log in and KDE would give me a black background. GUI apps, alt-tabbing and key shortcuts would work but no background or taskbar. GPU acceleration also wasn't working, as apps wouldn't use it (even though nvidia drivers were loaded). Then after some browsing of the forums I found https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA … de_setting was working out for a lot of people in similar situations.

So I added nvidia_drm.fbdev=1 and nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT on my /etc/default/grub and ran grub-mkconfig -o /efi/grub/grub.cfg.
This improved the situation, now I get KDE working back as it should and GUI apps are actually using my GPU. Except there's a catch: On graphics-intensive applications I get flickering and sometimes other graphical glitches: comparable to what you would get on a laptop screen running out of battery.

Any ideas what this could be?
Link to this boot's journalctl.

Last edited by lainlover (2024-04-03 19:00:05)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,805

Re: [SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

xwayland clients currently have a tendency for this issue on nvidia.

You can still switch to a Xorg session in SDDM which should restore behaviour as it was before. The flickering clients for xwayland can be somewhat mitigated with https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xorg … t-sync-git but actual proper fixes for this are in the entirety of the stack and a nvidia driver making actual use of this is 555 expected in May.

lainlover

Member

Registered: 2024-04-01

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

Hi, thanks for the help

I've tried your fix, both setting DisplayServer=x11 in a new file in /etc/sddm.conf.d (wiki approach) as well as installing the xorg-xwayland-explicit-sync-git patch. The former seems to not have actually switched sddm to X11 (wrong procedure for arch?) as I still see XWayland in ps, and the latter actually seems to have worsened the situation. I would like to stress I get no flickering at all in most windows, just CPU/GPU intensive ones like multimedia or videogames

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,805

Re: [SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

You switch to a xorg session in the session switcher of SDDM, SDDM itself does run on X11 by default but the plasma session it logs you into by default will be wayland, check the session dropdown (top left on the standard theme, bottom left on the Breeze theme)

lainlover

Member

Registered: 2024-04-01

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

It worked! I no longer get any flickering nor visual bugs or performance issues to speak of. I can also confirm that before these issues my session switcher only had the option of X11 in the drop-down, so that solves that mystery.
Marking this as solved, even though KDE does in general feel laggier in some ways (like switching virtual desktops) - perhaps this will be fixed in the future as you say.

Thanks for the help

TheMaciej

Member

Registered: 2024-03-28

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

Thank you so much for this info - I was struggling with this problem for a while now.
Didn't know how to approach this at all. Can you tell me where to look for information about this bug?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,805

Re: [SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

Which bug? The flickering for xwayland clients? The merge request for bringing support into this is here https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xse … quests/967 along with the entire discussion regarding it and some cross references to other drafts/merges and the fact that a proper implementation for the nvidia driver is expected for 555 in May

TheMaciej

Member

Registered: 2024-03-28

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] NVIDIA 550.67 - Visual flickering in KDE after system upgrade

Thanks for that!