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Display glitching/flickering
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Description

For about two months I encounter graphical glitches and/or flickering of the screen. By "glitches" I mean something like a horizontal white line (like you see with some VGA artefacts) which usually occurs when I interact with the panel in some way, say hovering or clicking. By "flickering" I mean the entire screen going dark for a split second.

This happens when other programs are open or with every (GUI) application closed. Sometimes the issue takes a while before it shows up, sometimes it manifests right after boot. But for the last couple weeks it's been happening basically every time I work on this machine.

I thought this might be a hardware issue, so I've tested other distros (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora) in a live environment and I don't see get this issue there - though I haven't spent too much time with that.

I know this is pretty vague, but I don't know how to describe it better or pinpoint the issue further. If I can provide more useful information, please tell me how. For now, here's some basic information about my system, all updates applied as of 2020-10-05.

System:
  Kernel: 5.6.19-158.current x86_64 bits: 64 
  Desktop: Budgie 10.5.1 Distro: Solus 4.1 

CPU:
  Quad Core: Intel Core i5-8250U type: MT MCP speed: 800 MHz 
  min/max: 400/1600 MHz 

Graphics:
  Intel UHD Graphics 620 driver: i915 v: kernel 
  Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.9 driver: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa 
  resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
  OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2) v: 4.6 Mesa 20.1.9

Thank you for your time!

Event Timeline

Update: Here's a video that depicts the issue I experience (not my video, AMD hardware, very old release of Solus): Screen Tearing on Solus 1.2.0.5

My uninformed conclusions and (non-)solutions so far:

  • Noticed that my display refresh rate was set to 120 Hz, so I changed it back to 60 Hz (which is my laptop's refresh rate). In fact, I tried out all the available refresh rates! However, this does nothing.
  • I think it could be a compositing issue. I couldn't find much on the Solus forums (which is probably a good thing) or anywhere else for that matter. But two users describe a similar problem with KWin that might have gotten resolved by an update along the line. (Screen flickering on Solus Plasma)
  • As suggested by EbonJaeger in that thread, I created a config-file for Intel in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ named 20-intel.conf and filled it with his recommendations. This actually does seem to get rid of the flickering! BUT it also results in noticable screen tearing in Firefox and LibreOffice. I also experience a (subjectively felt, not empirically measured) loss of performance. Therefore I removed the config-file, which restores performance and smoothness, but also brings back the flickering issue.

At the moment I don't have much time to tinker around with that Intel config file, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be glad to try them! Should my findings lead to any other suggestions, I'd be happy to test them as well. In any case, I will wait for the Gnome 3.38 stack and report back, once those upgrades are in place.

Thanks for your time!

Update: Unfortunately the issue persists with all updates applied as of December 19th 2020.

I'd really like to get to the bottom of this, so if anybody has advise on which log files to look for, I'd appreciate your help.

In the meantime: Thanks for your attention, have a happy holiday season!

After some further experimenting, I thought I had narrowed the problem down to the X.org configuration in the 20-intel.conf file under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d

I ended up with the most basic parameters and this got rid of the flickering issues while maintaining performance. Interestingly enough, the file got deleted after the last X.org upgrade again, and I've noticed some flickering here and there since, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as before.

I reckon the issue is caused by some conflict between my Intel UHD620 chip and X.org and potentially can be resolved with enough time and the right parameters in the config file.

Therefore, please feel free to close this thread.

szb claimed this task.