terrible screen flicker in 11.10

[Britt Yazel]

After upgrading to 11.10 I am getting terrible screen flicker with the opensourced ATI drivers. Every time I go to the desktop switcher I get crazy flickering across the screen. When I go into my lenses I get horrible flickering.

I tried installing gnome-shell to see if there would be flickering there, and I still get occasional flickering, but not nearly as much. I even tried install Kubuntu, but it is also suffering from horrible flickering.

I believe the problem has to do with xorg, during the early parts in alpha development I didn't have a flickering problem, but towards the end and now it is extremely bad.

Also, when I install the fglrx proprietary drivers the flickering goes away (though the window responsibleness is horrible). Also, I am still having the issue when uninstalling fglrx it breaks my entire desktop.

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 x64, on an acer aspire 5553 with a Mobility Radeon HD 4200 series card.

Will we be seeing Catalyst 11.9 or 11.10 at all?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Bjørn Panyella Pedersen (bjopp)]

Got the same problem after a fresh install of kubuntu 11.10 x64.
Also, and likely related, I cannot access any virtual terminal using Ctrl+Alt+F[1-6]. I just get a black screen, but I can resume the first graphical X session by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7.
Using an HP Elitebook8530w with a Nvidia Quadro FX 770M card and running Nvidia driver 173.14.30.

[Britt Yazel (brittyboi)]

On my Desktop PC I am running 11.10 x64 with a AMD Radeon HD 6950 graphics card with Gallium 0.4 on AMD Cayman drivers, and I do not get any flicker at all.

Although, on my AMD Radeon HD mobility 4200 series card on my laptop, I get horrible flicker while doing most things in Unity and Gnome-Shell, and that is while running the standard Gallium 0.4 drivers.

Is there something drastically different in the drivers between these two different cards?

[Britt Yazel (brittyboi)]

I have noticed on my HD mobility 4200 Series card and with the open sourced drivers, most of the screen flicker in Gnome Shell happens when there is a windows shown and you mouse to the bottom right hand corner to see notifications. The sides of whatever window is open will flicker black when the shadow gradient appears at the bottom of the screen

[Britt Yazel (brittyboi)]

In Unity this issue mostly occurs when viewing different lenses. The whole 'lens' feature creates a black tear that streches the span of the screen and is very ugly. Also, when dragging a window to the top to use the "snap-to-fullscreen" feature it has HORRIBLE tearing. Unity tearing is far worse than Gnome-Shell tearing, but both are present.

[Cátia Keiko de Campos Kitahara (5u-aontat6-ex)]

I'm also having this same problem. I have a dell notebook, Vostro 3550 model with AMD Radeon HD 6630M card. At first the screen flickered a lot for some minutes right after turning it on. After a while it stopped, but yesterday after I've downloaded and installed the last updates, the screen became completely black, and didn't stop blinking, on and off again.

[renemoraes (renenrmoraes)]

Same problem here with a Dell Inspiron 15r and AMD Radeon HD 6470M card.

[Bjørn Panyella Pedersen (bjopp)]

I found a workaround that works for me. This only works for nvidia-cards.
The problem I appear to have is also discussed here for 10.04:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1476693.

The problem for nvidia in my case is the 'PowerMizer' feature that is found on laptops using nvidia-drivers. It dynamically underclocks the GPU when it's not being used much, and this caused the flickering in my case.

The workaround I have found so far was to follow what was suggested here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=828369&highlight=powermizer

Basically I run this script in the background, forcing my 'Performance Level' to be fixed at 1.

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
    nice /usr/bin/nvidia-settings -q all &> /dev/null
    sleep 25
done

Ugly, but it works :)

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Britt Yazel, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xorg-server REPLACE-WITH-BUG-NUMBER

Please note, given you have already done this on a prior release, doing this on a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xorg-server (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Tereshenko Dmitriy (drugsmouse)]

Hi Christofer, I'm using Ubuntu 14.04.1 ans I can still reproduce this issue. It start flickering after some time and for stopping it I have to use "sudo xinput set-prop 8 "Device Enabled" 0".

Should I run "apport-collect -p xorg-server 875504" while my screen flickering or I can just do it right now? (now it doesn't flicker)

Thanks

[Tereshenko Dmitriy (drugsmouse)]

Just want to add little bit. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04.1 wyth Unity on my Dell 3550 with ADM Radeon 6630M card.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Tereshenko Dmitriy, given you have completely different hardware then the original reporter, it's preferred you file a new report via a terminal:
ubuntu-bug xorg

Please ensure you have xdiagnose installed, and that you click the Yes button for attaching additional debugging information.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs