Fullscreen windows are tearing in Xorg sessions

[Daniel van Vugt]

Fullscreen windows (like Totem) are tearing in gnome-shell Xorg sessions.

This is probably to do with composite unredirecting... In compiz we have a workaround to avoid this tearing by disallowing unredirect ("bypass") in known problematic video players. But I'm not sure if mutter has such a workaround/whitelist/blacklist we can use.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Jani Uusitalo (uusijani)]

In addition to Totem, Firefox also exhibits this with fullscreen HTML5 video. Here's a good test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xkNy9gfKOg

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Yes, this going to be a general problem with fullscreen windows in Xorg sessions.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I've moved some old tearing bugs in here since I now understand it's just a bug in the Xorg modesetting driver, which is the one that most machines use:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/244

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Apparently it's also a bug in the Nvidia driver still.

This issue needs to be fixed separately in each Xorg driver.

[Ksawery Wieczorkowski-Rettinger (ksawery)]

Same issue, visible in VLC, mpv Media Player and Google Chrome when in fullscreen mode. I'm using 150% fractional scaling, Ubuntu 19.10.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

That's actually two bugs; this one and bug 1846398. If the tearing is an issue for you then try logging into "Ubuntu on Wayland" instead.

[Giovanni (aka Vanni) Totaro (vanni-totaro)]

Workaround:

Alt+F2
lg [enter]
Meta.disable_unredirect_for_display(global.display) [enter]

[Giovanni (aka Vanni) Totaro (vanni-totaro)]

Relevant: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1873/disable-unredirect-fullscreen-windows/

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

New fix proposed upstream:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/1006