Rendering issues in virtual machines (GTK ngl backend)

[Oliver Smith]

Build: Noble Daily Current from 12th April

Host OS: Windows 11

VM App: VMWare Workstation 17 Player

Issue: During installation there is continuous black flickering artefacts throughout the flow. Installation completed successfully, got to GDM, logged in but desktop screen is black and then locks up the whole application, cannot shutdown or interact with Player and need to hard kill from task manager.

The issue appears does not appear with Mantic with the exact same machine configuration and appears to be an issue with GPU, my host machine is running an NVIDIA 4070ti with the latest windows drivers.

On reboot some elements of the desktop are visible but cannot be interacted with without further lockups.

[Oliver Smith (local-optimum)]

Additional info: This issue is not present when 3D acceleration is disabled

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Discussed on the chat, it seems setting GSK_RENDERER=gl workaround the issue so probably a GTK problem. I've opened a bug upstream now, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6624

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The mesa upstream bug suggests it's fixed for vmware in the newest version but not for virtualbox

[Łukasz Zemczak (sil2100)]

I have accepted the new mesa upload that should fix at least the vmware issues.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I have split VirtualBox to a separate issue, https://launchpad.net/bugs/2061584 because we believe the VMWare issue is fixed with mesa 24.0.5-1ubuntu1 in noble-proposed.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

24.0.5 is in noble now

[Oliver Smith (local-optimum)]

@Timo, I have tried the latest daily with the new Mesa and there is no change to behaviour it is still non-functional with 3D acceleration enabled.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Then what is different to upstream? There seem to be more than one report of success with 24.0.5

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I was unable to complete the VMWare Workstation Player 17 install on a Ubuntu 24.04 LTS host even though there is a Linux installer.

Note that this bug report says that the host is Windows 11.

Similarly, I was able to install VirtualBox on a Ubuntu 24.04 LTS host but was unable to duplicate https://launchpad.net/bugs/2061584 . I suspect that it happens on a Windows 11 host because I have heard reports of it affecting someone with a Windows 11 host with Intel graphics (no Nvidia).

I have other priority work I need to do today, but someone interested in trying to duplicate this bug should check if it happens with a Windows 11 host.

[Adam Williamson (awilliamson)]

FWIW, I did my testing - which found this is broken for a Fedora 40 guest with mesa 24.0.4, but fixed with 24.0.5 - on a Windows 11 (23H2) host. No idea what's different for Oliver, sorry :(

I guess I could try with an Ubuntu guest on my test setup, I've got a bit of spare time today.

[Adam Williamson (awilliamson)]

OK, so I just tried this out on the same host I did my Fedora 40 testing, a Windows 11 23H2 system with Intel graphics (no NVIDIA) and VMWare Player 17.

I grabbed the Ubuntu 24.04 beta desktop image - ubuntu-24.04-beta-desktop-amd64.iso - and booted it. From that environment I could reproduce the bug. I tested using "Files" (nautilus) - I ran it and it was completely messed up in much the same way as on Fedora, lots of bits of the UI just not shown at all.

Then I ran an install. I guess your installs work differently from ours, they don't just dump the live environment onto the disk, because when I booted the installed system, it had mesa 24.0.5 already (verified with `dpkg -l`). And for me, the bug is indeed fixed. Now when I run Files, it renders perfectly. Ditto Text Editor (another GTK4 app).

However, reading Oliver's original description again, it really doesn't sound like the same bug. I didn't observe any "black flickering artifacts" during install, and I never saw such a thing in Fedora 40 testing either. I also didn't see anything like "desktop screen is black and then locks up the whole application, cannot shutdown or interact with Player". For me, both in Ubuntu and Fedora, when a system is affected by this bug, GTK 4-based apps tend to be missing large amounts of UI elements, but the desktop shell itself is not affected at all, let alone does it lock up or become unresponsive.

So, I think Oliver is seeing something else, but I don't know what. I'd recommend you get a few more folks to test and see what they see, and report the host hardware config.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

(The latest version of the Ubuntu Desktop installer installs all available updates at the end of the install. It's a nice feature in cases like this.)

[Oliver Smith (local-optimum)]

My issue is compounded by the fact that Ubuntu registers no network interfaces in Ubuntu on vmwareplayer in NAT mode and it sees a connection but can't connect in bridged mode. As a result I can't apply updates on install or upgrade my NVIDIA drivers which may help resolve the issue. I will try again with the newer NVIDIA drivers in the next daily.

[Philip M (pmilosla)]

vmware 17.5 win 11
not fixed with todays iso. mesa is 24.0.5.
Can see gui without enable 3d acceleration, but black screen and have to task manager kill with 3d acceleration.
rtx 2070

[Philip M (pmilosla)]

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.3447]
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor, 3600 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
System Model X570 AORUS PRO WIFI
RTX 2070

[Philip M (pmilosla)]

Also tried virtualbox this morning on a different win 11 machine with an nvidia laptop gpu and same thing.

No 3D acceleration is not stable on vmware (crashes after a while)
With 3D acceleration black screens really fast on vmware and virtualbox (which uses the vmware driver by default)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Generalised to cover non-VMware (bug 2063923).

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Users of the Nvidia 470 driver please see bug 2061079.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Bug 2061079 being so similar makes me think long term we will find that GTK4 is doing something wrong. We just don't know what it's doing wrong yet.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Also tracking in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11008

[Philip M (pmilosla)]

I was able to get something working on my win 11 i9-13900H discrete RTX2000 laptop.

I used:
mks.enable3d = "TRUE"
mks.enableDX12Renderer = "TRUE"
mks.enableDX11Renderer = "FALSE"
mks.dx12.vendorID = "0x17AA"

and I also had to do:
settings->system->dislay->graphics
entries for both vmware.exe and vmware-vmx.exe (its in a subdirectory)
Both entries specify that vmware must run only on RTX2000 and not the cpu GPU.

Still seeing
MESA: error: ZINK: failed to choose pdev
glx: failed to create drisw screen
but that might be known?
I dont think linux will be stable until you back off mesa to not have that error.