Persistent compositing glitches

[Andrew Aylett]

Binary package hint: metacity

Occasionally, a small area of the screen will be taken up by a patch of grey which is drop-shadowed like a window and always sits on top of other windows, but which persists across workspaces and is invisible to xprop. It's often been triggered by transient objects (menus and tooltips), but doesn't always take up the entire area of the menu. Less often, I'll be left with pieces of an application window.

I'm using metacity with compositing enabled. The only way I've found to remove the glitches is to interrupt the compositor -- either by turning it off or by restarting the window manager.

I've included a screenshot of the latest occurrence.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: metacity 1:2.30.2-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.33-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Sep 24 21:07:03 2010
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 LC_COLLATE=C
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: metacity

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

I'm confirming this. It has happened for a while now on two machines running Ubuntu 10.10.
One is a netbook with Intel graphics, the other has Nvidia graphics (and the problem occurs with both free and proprietary drivers).

So, it isn't a driver problem ;)

[Lucazade (lucazade)]

Same here, using Nvidia and Intel drivers.

[zyrorl (zyrorl)]

I get the exact same problem here with Nvidia Drivers.

This is a really annoying, and serious issue that makes it impossible to see through those glitches.

This should definitely be fixed before release, its pretty unacceptable.

[Andrew Aylett (andrew-aylett)]

@zyrorl: Fixing before release might be tricky, as release was two days ago now :).

Interestingly, I'm not seeing this issue any more, with the same version of metacity installed. No idea what might have fixed it.

[Collin Stocks (collinstocks)]

I used Metacity compositor in previous versions, and the problems only started to occur with Maverick.

This affects AMD64 as well, with the final release of Maverick.

The problem occurs in two situations which I can find:
1) When a menu (context or otherwise) is exited, the menu sometimes is not hidden.
2) When an image or selection is dragged in Chromium browser. Presumably, this uses the same mechanism to show the selection being dragged as other applications use to show menus.

Once the menu is no longer supposed to be on the screen (I.E. it has been exited, but garbage still remains visible), interaction with the garbage goes to the window behind it. Applications such as X Window Information are unable to detect the garbage.

[Andrew Cowie (afcowie)]

Observing this on Maverick. Quite annoying. It's especially common with menus but happens with tooltips too. The only thing to do is to kill the parent process.

Can anyone with metacity experience suggest the code path that we should be looking at?

AfC

[Terry Dow (terrydowcc)]

AS OF TODAY MARCH 25, 2011, I have same problem on Maverick(10.10) 2.6.35-28-generic
Pentium III (coppermine)

Having same issue as described above (a shadowed portion left by context menu appearing above other windows, but falls behind flash objects) Also pieces of other context menus get trapped in it. Can sometimes get it to clear by duplicating the same context menu at same point on screen. Which tells me it does not always do it.

How do I make it go away without logging out; what process do I kill?

[Andrew Aylett (andrew-aylett)]

Hi Terry,

You need to restart metacity. The easiest way to do that is to hit Alt-F2 so that the run application dialog appears, then run `metacity --replace`.

[Ivan Frederiks (idfred)]

Met same bug.
System: Natty (Ubuntu Classic session), i386, proprietary nVidia driver.
Screenshot attached.

[Ivan Frederiks (idfred)]

Artifacts mentioned above do not seem to be "workflow-critical". But there is other type of artifact related to metacity and shadows. It appears when I expand tag list in Firefox bookmarking tool and seems to be a little bit more nasty. See attached screenshot.

P.S.
With compositor disabled artifact disappears.

[dino99 (9d9)]

EOL have been reached, so no more maintenance. If that issue still exist, then report again using ubuntu-bug.