[X1600] Dual-head flickers

[JonathanTurner]

After a fresh Intrepid install everything is working great on the Mobility X1600 this iMac has. But, as I had a monitor I used while in OS X beside it, I tried to get dual-head working, which before xrandr was nearly impossible to any satisfaction.

In Intrepid it "just worked", bravo!

So, my issue now is that there seems to be two sources of flicker with dual-head that do not appear in normal single head, with this setup:

  * In some areas of the screen the mouse will strobe or flicker with what looks like noise... I thought it might be one-off issues with the mouse pointer image, but I couldn't find any rhyme or reason to it. Other parts of the screen the pointer works just fine. This happens only in extended desktop.

  * Occasionally, the window in focus will "blink" outside of its bounds, as if not contained for a split second. This happens with both mirrored and extended desktop.

Again, they seem to be isolated to just dual-head mode, so I haven't been able to reproduce them without it.

Monitor #1: 1440x900 iMac
Monitor #2: 1680x1050 Dell 20"

It's worth noting, too, that using mixed monitor resolutions, or keeping them at the same resolution, doesn't seem to have an effect on the flicker, which still occurs.
[lspci]
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub [8086:27a0] (rev 03)
     Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600] [1002:71c5]
     Subsystem: Apple Computer Inc. Device [106b:0080]

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Please attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log and the output of lspci -vvnn

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

i have the same problem
should i attach these files, too or should i create a new bug?

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

ps: i dont know if/how it is related, but i suffer from bug 203355 , too so the monitor 1680x1050 monitor is not detected properly in the first place...

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

here you go...

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

and the log

[JonathanTurner (probata)]

My Xorg.0.log

[JonathanTurner (probata)]

And my lspci -vvnn output.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hi Jonathan,

Can you test with EXA set in your xorg.conf?

Section "Device"
    ...
    Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
EndSection

If that doesn't make a difference, we should forward this upstream.

[JonathanTurner (probata)]

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA" doesn't seem to have any effect.

To make sure it was being used, I double checked the Xorg.0.log to make sure it was coming on, and I do get the:

(**) RADEON(0): Using EXA acceleration architecture

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

this should be set to triaged and forwarded to upstream

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hmm, next I'd like to forward this issue upstream, but first it must be retested on latest Jaunty to make sure the issue still happens there with the latest code. ISO images are available at http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/releases/jaunty/. If you can reproduce it in the LiveCD environment, you shouldn't need to modify your installed system. Also please attach a fresh Xorg.0.log from this testing.

[JonathanTurner (probata)]

Bryce,

I'll see if I can get a Xorg.0.log here in a bit, but the flicker is definitely still there. Actually, I had other problems, perhaps related to configuring the video while on livecd. Changing the resolution corrupted about 1/4th of the visible screen real estate with garbled data that you couldn't move your mouse into. I had to restart gdm twice to finally get to the correct resolution.

[JonathanTurner (probata)]

Up-to-date lspci -vvnn also

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Btw, is this an AGP card?

[JonathanTurner (probata)]

@Bryce - no clue, since it's an iMac it's one of those all-in-one deals.

[Joel Aelwyn (fenton)]

I have been experiencing the same issue since switching to the radeon driver recently (when I upgraded to Jaunty). Using a Thinkpad T60 w/ X1400 mobility chipset, the built-in screen, and an external LCD monitor.

I get the flicker on both screens, always bounded around the cursor. The upper-left of the flickering region appears to be at the upper-left corner of the cursor, and the region never appears to extend significantly beyond the cursor.

There appear to be rectangular 'regions' of the screen in which this consistently happens, when it does happen; I have not been able to determine if they are consistent between applications or between server restarts. Putting the cursor anywhere in the region triggers the behavior, but the exact pattern varies depending on where in the region it falls.

The region I am testing with at the moment does *not* appear to shift when the visual under it shifts (for example, scrolling the browser window I'm typing in so that either bug text, blank page, or text entry box is under the region). Rather, it stays the same place and size, and the flicker pattern remains the same for any given spot in it. It *does* appear that the exact shade of the flicker may depend on what color the underlying visual is, however.

For the benefit of anyone looking for "ATI flicker" issues: this is almost certainly not the same as bug #351423; neither switching to XAA from EXA nor setting the "MigrationHeuristic" option to "greedy" appear to make any noticeable difference in the behavior, and the symptoms are not particularly similar.

Including Xorg.0.log, will include lspci output in the next comment.

[Joel Aelwyn (fenton)]

... and here's the lspci output.

[Joel Aelwyn (fenton)]

Of course, it might help to run the correct command to get the lspci output. Let's try that again, with -vvnn this time.

[rungss (rungss)]

Me too facing these issues

Here are the files for my installation

=========
Also,ying to
I am tr
=========
Also I am trying to explain my Observations....

Keyboard Issue
=============
When I am typing text the cursor position changes at random and moves to some location backwards hence tempering what i was typing. As I started to type this message, I intended to type the following line:

"Also,
I am trying to explain my Observations...."

but during this the cursor moved and I ended up typing

"Also,ying to
I am tr"

Mouse/Scrollbar
===========
When I scroll down anything to reach the bottom of the Page, the Scrollbar kind of gets pushed back up a little(About 50-100px) immediately after hitting the bottom...

Just like what will happen if a Train hits the terminal Springs slowly and then will recoil back... if you get my Point...

Hope these help us solve the Problem...

[karbak (karreg)]

Another data point - this flicker issue is happening for me (running an updated 9.04) on a Thinkpad T60p with an ATI FireGL V5250 graphics card when it's connected to a 1680x1050 Dell 2209WA external display. There seem to be vertical regions that run the height of the screen, about 10-20 pixels across where, if the cursor is present, flickering is triggered. There are about 5 of vertical strips, roughly equally spaced on the 1400x1050 laptop display.

lspci output and Xorg.0.log attached.

[Joel Aelwyn (fenton)]

After some "quality time" tinkering with pointer sizes and xev, I found a fairly solid pattern to the areas which trigger flickering:

1) Display size is 2560x1024, DPI is 96.

2) Flickering appears to occur when *any* portion of the pointer image is withing the affected area. The effect is distinctly noticeable on a large dark arrow, since part but not all of the cursor can end up with flickering, if positioned correctly.

3a) On the *primary* screen (LVDS on the T60) the areas are roughly 36 pixels high, and their upper bounds appear to follow the pattern (N*79)+40. I initially guessed at (N*80)+40, but when I checked near the bottom of the screen, it was off by a good ten pixels or so, while 79 appears to predict every value my screen can reach. Also, 1024 is an integer multiple of the formula ((12*79)+40+36 = 1024).

3b) On the *secondary* screen, the flickering appears to be a single column from the top of the screen to the bottom; there are no obvious "breaks" of space where flickering does not occur.

4) On both screens the flicker area appears to be roughly 8 pixels wide, and the right-most bound appears to align fairly closely with (N*512). Much like (3a), this means that the right-most part of the final area aligns pretty much exactly with the right-hand side of the screen (5*512=2560).

5) As a final note, in a couple of spots the visual result of the flickering was to have multiple 'ghost' copies of the pointer offset directly below the main pointer. This was not consistent between areas, though any given area appears to produce roughly the same pattern each time it flickers, even when the pointer has moved away in the interim.

[rungss (rungss)]

The Thread at the following locations seems to be related to this.

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/68800

the Solution can be found here.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4

I haven't tried this yet, so not sure if this works for me.

will update...

I haven't used launchpad much so couldn't figure out how to link these two Pages..

[Joel Aelwyn (fenton)]

Not really sure why that would help, since this issue with the ATI graphics hardware and drivers, not Intel. Also, unlike the Intel problem this exhibits even when compiz is turned off completely. I have it disabled for other reasons, but it has been disabled since well before I did the Jaunty upgrade, and I just went and double-checked that it didn't accidentally get turned on somehow -- it didn't.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

[This is an automatic notification.]

A new version of the -ati driver is now available in Karmic.

This is a significant update to -ati which brings in kernel mode-setting
(currently disabled) and scores of fixes for DRI2, EXA, etc.

I've posted the new version of this driver to the following PPA,
would you mind testing it and seeing if it resolves the bug you
reported?

  https://edge.launchpad.net/~bryceharrington/+archive/ppa/+sourcepub/709908/+listing-archive-extra

If you're not running this release of Ubuntu, you can try booting the Karmic
LiveCD and loading the PPA onto it, and then log out/in to restart X.
ISOs are available at http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/releases/

After testing Karmic, report back here whether it's still an issue or not,
and if it is please post a fresh Xorg.0.log and 'dmesg' output.

Note there could be new bugs... please file these as new reports using
the command 'ubuntu-bug xorg'.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

We're closing this bug since it is has been some time with no response from the original reporter. However, if the issue still exists please feel free to reopen with the requested information. Also, if you could, please test against the latest development version of Ubuntu, since this confirms the bug is one we may be able to pass upstream for help.

[Yaron (sh-yaron)]

Still happens in Ubuntu 10.10 with dual monitor, ATI drivers are from PPA (xorg-edgers)