i7-6500U screen flickering and blinking

[tubearch]

I have a HP Spectre x360 laptop with i7-6500U and HD Graphics 520, running Linux Mint 18 MATE x86_64.

Right after X launches rendering, screen starts to produce glitches, flickering, artifacts and blinking both on framebuffer and X.

I've made a short video that demonstrates this exact behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWQ4SdMsy_4

I have tried using other kernels from PPA mainline, including "intel drm nightly", without success.
Kernels I tried exactly: 4.4.0-21, 4.5.0, 4.6.0, 4.6.2, 4.7.0-994, 4.8.0-994 (intel drm nightly)

I have also tried Debian Stretch (4.6.0-1), Slackware 14.2 (4.4.x), Arch 2016.08.01 (4.6.4.1).
All these distros show exactly the same behaviour.

It happens using both UEFI and Legacy boot modes.

I am including dmesg, Xorg.log and lspci -c outputs using all these kernels in this report.

Important note that it only happens using 4.x kernels. I've just tried Ubuntu 14.04.3 with 3.19.0-25 kernel, it runs fine without any issue.

[tubearch (tubearch)]

I thought that it's worth including logs of a working Ubuntu 14.04.3 running 3.19.0-25 kernel for further comparisson, because there are completely no issues using this kernel.

[tubearch (tubearch)]

Also I forgot to mention that I have tried all possible kernel boot parameters (i915.enable_rc6, i915.preliminary_hw_support, etc) and Xorg configurations, including from here https://github.com/linuxenko/ubuntu-skylake-i915-video-fix

Changing DPI to "False" doesn't change anything. Tried also AccelMethod with uxa/sna, without success. Changing "tearfree" value makes no changes.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Wladimir Mutel (mwg)]

See this or a very similar behaviour on ASUS X302LA when working on battery (plugged out of 220V AC mains)
Plugged into mains, the notebook display works much better (no mad flickering at all, only some problems with resuming it from blank display, but this is a different topic).

[Wladimir Mutel (mwg)]

Ubuntu 16.10-yakkety-dev, kernel 4.4.0-9134-generic, everything recently updated from Yakkety repo & rebooted

[Wladimir Mutel (mwg)]

CPU Core i5-5200U, GPU ID 8086:1616 (HD Graphics 5500)

[Wladimir Mutel (mwg)]

From what I read on this topic. this could well be Asus hardware problem.
Display and mainboard are fed from a single PSU. And when this PSU is on batteries, and the mainboard is taking peak current for its CPU, display LED highlight is getting underpowered and it is going black.
I have at least two Asus X302 modifications at hand (X302LA and X302UV), showing exactly this behavior under either Linux (Ubuntu 18.04) or Windows 10 (1803). So I would suppose this is not easily fixable with software. When there'll be time to replace these laptops, I surely will try to ask repairmen about fixing their backlights. But so far, they are our daily-used 'production' systems.