Bug 463023 - scrolling in gnome-terminal causes flickering of the whole screen
Summary: scrolling in gnome-terminal causes flickering of the whole screen
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: xorg-x11-drv-ati
Version: 11
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Dave Airlie
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2008-09-20 21:07 UTC by Michal Schmidt
Modified: 2018-04-11 14:41 UTC (History)
9 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-09-07 15:28:14 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)
Xorg.0.log (39.06 KB, text/plain)
2008-09-20 21:07 UTC, Michal Schmidt
no flags Details
rhl6856 xorg.0.log (68.34 KB, application/octet-stream)
2010-04-20 15:27 UTC, Ryan H. Lewis (rhl)
no flags Details
rhl6856 xorg.conf (2.80 KB, application/octet-stream)
2010-04-20 15:30 UTC, Ryan H. Lewis (rhl)
no flags Details

Description Michal Schmidt 2008-09-20 21:07:46 UTC
Created attachment 317292 [details]
Xorg.0.log

Description of problem:
Scrolling text in gnome-terminal causes annoying flickering of the whole desktop. It's like if the whole picture moves a few pixels down, some additional black stripes appear randomly and then the screen is redrawn correctly. All of this happens in a small fraction of a second.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-14.fc10.x86_64


How reproducible:
I can reproduce it at will.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run gnome-terminal
2. vim some_long_text_file
3. hold the down or up arrow to scroll the text
  
Actual results:
About once every second the visible flicker occurs.

Expected results:
Scrolling in gnome-terminal should not have any effect outside of the window.

Additional info:

I have a Toshiba laptop with an ATI chip:
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series] [1002:791f]

I do not have an xorg.conf, I let X autodetect everything.

While experimenting with this bug I discovered that it only happens with (the default) EXA acceleration method. Adding a xorg.conf with 'Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"' makes the bug go away.

Comment 1 Matěj Cepl 2008-09-22 14:53:06 UTC
Behdad, any thoughts? Or is it just pure our mess?

Comment 2 Behdad Esfahbod 2008-09-22 16:16:41 UTC
Sounds like X issues.  Very unlikely to be g-t.

Comment 3 Michal Schmidt 2008-09-23 12:27:56 UTC
I downloaded and installed an older version of the driver from Koji: xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.8.0-19.fc10.x86_64

The older version defaults to XAA, but when forced to use EXA with 'Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"', the same flickering happens.

Comment 4 Matěj Cepl 2008-09-24 22:20:23 UTC
And what about other way around? Using the latest -ati driver and put "AccelMethod" "XAA" into xorg.conf?

Comment 5 Michal Schmidt 2008-09-25 08:17:17 UTC
Matej,
I wrote that in the original report. With the current driver version 'Option "AccelMethod""XAA"' makes the bug go away.

So no matter whether I use the old or the new driver version, EXA always flickers, XAA never does.

Comment 6 Michal Schmidt 2008-10-13 14:04:08 UTC
Still reproducible with xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-25.fc10.x86_64.

The flickering effect is best observed when cpufreq is set to a lower frequency (in my case 800 MHz). With the CPU running at full speed (2 GHz), the flickering is much less visible.

Also I noticed the flickering happens with other applications besides gnome-terminal. With gnome-terminal it's just the easiest to reproduce.

Comment 7 Jan Martinek 2008-10-28 15:00:18 UTC
On my computer (MB Asus M2A-VM with RS690), the flickering is visible only when the display is rotated to portrait mode using "xrandr -o left" AND the system is resumed from sleep mode.

After fresh boot, the flickering is barely visible. But after suspend/resume it becomes clearly noticeable and annoying even with CPU running at full 2.5 GHz. 

kernel: 2.6.27.4-51.fc10.x86_64
driver: xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-31.fc10.x86_64

Dmesg after wakeup shows this:
[drm] Loading RS690/RS740 Microcode
[drm] Num pipes: 1

Comment 8 Jan Martinek 2008-10-28 15:41:38 UTC
I just noticed that once the flickering starts (after resuming the computer from suspend), killing/restarting the X server does not help. I must reboot the machine to get rid of the flickering.

Comment 9 Bug Zapper 2008-11-26 03:09:29 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 10 development cycle.
Changing version to '10'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Comment 10 Jóhann B. Guðmundsson 2008-12-01 11:35:49 UTC
There have been bunch of bug fixes

Could you retest with the latest kernel 
( -132 at the time of this writing )

You can get the latest kernel build here
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=72270 

And with the latest xorg-x11-drv-ati. 
( -60 at the time of this writing )

You can get the latest xorg-x11-drv-ati build here
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=95

And report back if it either improves or fixes this issue..

Thanks.

Comment 11 Michal Schmidt 2008-12-01 15:55:00 UTC
I have kernel kernel-2.6.27.7-133 (built myself from Fedora CVS) and xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-60. The bug is still there.

Comment 12 Michal Schmidt 2008-12-01 15:59:42 UTC
Unlike Jan, I do not need to rotate the screen or suspend/resume to see the flickering. I am seeing the bug right after a fresh boot and without rotation.

Comment 13 Jóhann B. Guðmundsson 2008-12-02 08:27:43 UTC
Hum.. 

Which X server build are you using?

Update to the latest in koji, Let's see if that does some wonders..

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=69927

Comment 14 Michal Schmidt 2008-12-02 09:47:25 UTC
xorg-x11-server-1.5.3-5.fc10 (currently the latest) is the one in F10 GA, so I'm already running that one.
I have upgraded to xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-61.fc10 and kernel-2.6.27.7-134.fc10 and the bug is still present.

Comment 15 Michal Schmidt 2009-01-28 16:00:31 UTC
Still trivially reproducible with:
xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.10.0-1.fc10.x86_64
xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.5.3-6.fc10.x86_64
kernel-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.x86_64

Comment 16 Michal Schmidt 2009-03-26 16:47:09 UTC
I upgraded the laptop to Rawhide. I can still reproduce the flickering as described in my original report.

xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.12.0-2.fc11.x86_64
xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.6.0-15.fc11.x86_64
kernel-2.6.29-0.279.rc8.git6.fc11.x86_64

Comment 17 Sam Tygier 2009-06-15 15:56:29 UTC
seeing the same thing on a toshiba with
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series]
on fedora11

i have tried setting accelmethod to xaa, but i still get exa, and the flickering.

Comment 18 Michal Schmidt 2009-07-03 12:39:59 UTC
The flickering is still reproducible with current Fedora 11, both with or without KMS.

There's a bit of good news: current upstream xf86-video-ati from git master is not affected. Here's a scratch build for testing:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1452541
It has serious issues with modesetting enabled, but works fine with "nomodeset".

Comment 19 Eduardo Habkost 2009-08-08 23:48:25 UTC
Also reproduced here, on a Thinkpad T60 running Fedora 11, with modesetting disabled.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc M52 [Mobility Radeon X1300] [1002:7149]


I am running xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.12.2-14.fc11.i586.

The problem was gone when using 'Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"'.

Comment 20 Michal Schmidt 2009-09-07 15:28:14 UTC
I cannot reproduce this in Rawhide, with or without KMS.
With KMS the scrolling is slow and far from smooth, but no flickering happens.

kernel-2.6.31-0.204.rc9.fc12.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.13.0-0.2.20090821gitb1b77a4d6.fc12.x86_64
xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.6.99-45.20090903.fc12.x86_64

Comment 21 Ryan H. Lewis (rhl) 2010-03-31 22:59:34 UTC
I'm running F12 with fluxbox as my desktop manager and having the same problem when using gnome-terminal. I'm on all the latest updates from yum update 

Here is all the relevant package info NOTE-- I'm not using an ATI card at all:

lspci -v | fpaste
http://fpaste.org/Mjj0/

yum info vim* | fpaste
http://fpaste.org/KZOU/

yum info xorg* | grep Name | fpaste
http://fpaste.org/pzYF/

yum info xorg* | fpaste
http://fpaste.org/evVQ/

I fix the issue by closing all my gnome-terminals and the problem goes away immediately.

Comment 22 Michal Schmidt 2010-04-01 12:53:53 UTC
Ryan,
issues like these are almost certainly hardware-specific and this BZ was about ATI, so please file a new bug and attach dmesg, /var/log/Xorg.0.log, /etc/X11/xorg.conf (if you use one) to it (directly to BZ, not via fpaste). Thank you.

Comment 23 Ryan H. Lewis (rhl) 2010-04-20 15:27:41 UTC
Created attachment 407847 [details]
rhl6856 xorg.0.log

Comment 24 Ryan H. Lewis (rhl) 2010-04-20 15:30:03 UTC
Created attachment 407848 [details]
rhl6856 xorg.conf

Comment 25 Ryan H. Lewis (rhl) 2010-04-20 15:31:01 UTC
alright done, 

dmesg | fpaste
Uploading (98.7K)...
http://fpaste.org/wcS9/


it doesn't seem like any of these things are producing relevant error text as the error is occuring.


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