Ubuntu

Screen flickering on Razer Blade Stealth (Late 2017) - [drm:intel_cpu_fifo_underrun_irq_handler [i915]] ERROR CPU pipe A FIFO underrun?

Bug #1739936 reported by John Stevens on 2017-12-24

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #1550779: Black screen flickering and [drm:intel_cpu_fifo_underrun_irq_handler [i915]] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun. Edit Remove

This bug affects 4 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Ubuntu	Confirmed	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

Hi. I've recently just received this laptop (it's the 8th gen i7 blade stealth) and it's plagued with screen flickering. I've tried installing the latest kernel with the proper i915 firmware. I've also tried Arch Linux, and had no luck there. So, I've settled back with Ubuntu and installed the 18.04 Bionic Beaver Daily ISO.

Description: Ubuntu Bionic Beaver (development branch)
Release: 18.04
Kernel: 4.15.0-997-generic

I'm not really sure what would be causing the issue. I'll happily use this as a test-bed to help improve Ubuntu! Thanks for your time.

John Stevens (reaperofshred) on 2018-01-07

no longer affects:

xorg (Ubuntu)

Revision history for this message

John Stevens (reaperofshred) wrote on 2018-01-07:

syslog.log Edit (1.5 KiB, text/plain)

Attached a bit of the syslog.

Revision history for this message

John Stevens (reaperofshred) wrote on 2018-01-07:

kern.log Edit (1.5 KiB, text/plain)

Attached a bit of kern.log

Revision history for this message

John Stevens (reaperofshred) wrote on 2018-01-07:

dmesg.log Edit (60.7 KiB, text/plain)

Output of dmesg.

summary:

- Screen flickering on Razer Blade Stealth (Late 2017)
+ Screen flickering on Razer Blade Stealth (Late 2017) -
+ [drm:intel_cpu_fifo_underrun_irq_handler [i915]] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO
+ underrun?

Revision history for this message

John Stevens (reaperofshred) wrote on 2018-01-22:

For anyone with this laptop... Upgrade to a newer kernel and install the latest Intel i915 firmware files. When the kernel installs it will warn you about which files you need. This will get rid of that FIFO underrun problem. (I chose drm-intel-nightly)

Most importantly adding i915.edp_vswing=2 to the kernel parameters should fix the terrible screen flickering. I hope this helps!

John Stevens (reaperofshred) on 2018-01-23

no longer affects:

archlinux

Revision history for this message

Grandpa (zegrandpa) wrote on 2018-08-28:

The issue is still present on arch.
Both on 4.18.5.arch1-1 and 4.14.67-1-lts.
It somewhat seems worse on the latest kernel (more frequent flickers).
i915.edp_vswing=2 does not fix the issue.

Revision history for this message

Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote on 2018-08-28:

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in ubuntu:
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

potro5 (parker-l-reed) wrote on 2018-10-04:

Same here. 4.18.11 on Arch and Stealth late 2016

Revision history for this message

Dominic Lemire (dominic-lemire) wrote on 2018-12-02:

I'm also on Stealth late 2016 (QHD). So far, I survived using i915.enable_rc6=0 until that parameter was removed from newer kernels, then I switched to using intel_idle.max_cstate=4. I still wish someone would find the real root cause of this issue.

Today, I noticed the flickering stops completely when I do "rmmod nvme" (booted into usb live ubuntu). Anyone knows how these 2 drivers can possibly affect each-other?

The flickering also temporarily stops while I'm writing a disk image to the nvme ssd.