Bug 859653

What driver version were you running before?  (yum history has answers.)  Does downgrading to that driver restore the old behaviour, or is it actually a kernel change you're seeing?

I see the same problem, I am not 100% sure which version works for me.

In my case, I believe the problems started on September 5th when I installed
this one:
Sep 05 10:34:08 Updated: xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.20.5-1.fc17.x86_64

Since then I have tried the .6 and .7 releases, both which don't work. I am
now testing .4 to see if it is better - unfortunately it can take quite a while
for the problems to show up.

Will report back.

Jes

*sigh* Well, now I'm even less certain where the issue lies, because I'm no longer able to reproduce the acute text-corruption I reported. That's somehow cleared up on its own, and my system has dropped back to just the same low-level interface corruption (window decorations, tooltips, sometimes overview mode) that I've been seeing for weeks now.

However, to Adam's question about versions, it does appear that my system received both new kernel and driver versions in the same update run, shortly before I made this report... so, I can't say for certain that one or the other was the problem.

The before/after on those versions, tho, for the record, is:

Before (Since 2012-09-07)
-------------------------
kernel-3.5.3-1.fc17.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.20.6-1.fc17.x86_64

After (On 2012-09-22, a few hours before I opened this bug)
-----------------------------------------------------------
kernel-3.5.4-1.fc17.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.20.7-1.fc17.x86_64


Since my system at present is exhibiting the same behavior I've been seeing all along — I only started using the HDMI output on this laptop again a month or so ago, and have been seeing corruption all along — don't think that shuffling around to older versions now would be of any use, unfortunately.)

Well, there aren't any i915 or generic drm changes between 3.5.3 and 3.5.4 that would apply here.

The big change to the X driver between those points was adding prime support, and there does appear to be a fix for prime buffers in newer libdrm.  Try this test build:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=4524876

Ugh.  That won't actually install on an F17 machine unless you force things, lousy nouveau ABI changing all the time.  New one coming shortly.

Sorry, was looking at an F18 machine, should work on F17.  Go ahead and --nodeps it in if you're not needing nouveau to work, you can yum distro-sync to the released versions afterwards.

Thanks, Adam... I've instaled on my laptop, without dependency incident:

Installing:
 drm-utils
          x86_64 2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1 /drm-utils-2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1.x86_64    161 k
Updating:
 libdrm   i686   2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1 /libdrm-2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1.i686         280 k
 libdrm   x86_64 2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1 /libdrm-2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1.x86_64       281 k
 libdrm-devel
          x86_64 2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1 /libdrm-devel-2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1.x86_64 285 k


...Will kick the tires a little and report back.

Oh, for the record, that upgrade was from the following rev:

Sep 09 08:29:20 Updated: libdrm-2.4.37-1.fc17.x86_64
Sep 09 08:29:22 Updated: libdrm-devel-2.4.37-1.fc17.x86_64
Sep 09 08:29:44 Updated: libdrm-2.4.37-1.fc17.i686

Created attachment 617706 [details]
Screenshot showing re-occurrence of corruption under libdrm test build

After fully rebooting my laptop and running with the libdrm-2.4.39-1.fc17.jx1 test build for nearly 24 hours, I was beginning to feel like the situation might be improved; I was still seeing some transient image/icon corruption, but experienced no recurrence of the gnome-shell/mutter window decoration "noise" — that, at least, was a welcome improvement.

Then, a few minutes ago, "something" occurred (I know not what) which re-triggered the massive text corruption problem. It's actually worse than the previous example — in many windows, nearly every text glyph is scrambled; in the case of Firefox and Nautilus, into total unreadability. Screenshot attached.

I can't find anything, anywhere that would seem to indicate the cause of this event, though. Nothing in /var/log/messages, /var/log/Xorg.0.log, or $HOME/.xsession-errors appears to be relevant.

dmesg output is uninteresting. I did find an occurrence, once again, of the i915 render error I included at the end of comment#1... but that message was output more than 18 hours ago, and the most recent message (of any sort) is > 3 hours old.

I'm still running in the corrupted session, in case there's any useful failure information I can capture — I'll try to keep it alive as long as possible, but that may not be very long considering the impact on usability. (For instance, I had to open a Chrome window to post this — all text in Firefox remains unintelligible. Interestingly, the corruption didn't "follow" me into Chrome when it was launched, though some Chrome window titles and etc. are scrambled. So, at least for now, as long as I browse in Chrome I'm unaffected.)

Also, this is probably (past) time I should mention that my system isn't running the standard distro fontconfig and freetype, but rather Infinality's latest patches (http://www.infinality.net/blog/infinality-freetype-patches/) from his Fedora 17 repo:

fontconfig-infinality-1-20120615_1.noarch.rpm
freetype-infinality-2.4.10-1.20120616_01.fc17.x86_64.rpm

There's at least a small possibility the font-corruption issue comes from those builds — however, since I'm also seeing image corruption, they can't be solely responsible.

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