KDE desktop compositing occasionally causes strange visual artifacts. This includes the following problems, which may or may not be related: - Certain panels flicker when rendering against other panels, which looks as if the two are z-fighting. I often see this with Skype notifications in the system tray as they interfere with the Plasma panel. - The Plasma desktop no longer executes visual updates unless the user does an action that forces it to. For example: If you have an analog clock with the seconds hand enabled, you will notice that it's stuck and the hands aren't moving any longer... however if you switch desktops to force a redraw, the hands will move to represent the current time but only once at that moment. This problem is rare and always goes away after toggling desktop compositing. - The contents of certain windows are no longer updated, and a past version of the window is drawn instead. I often think the application has frozen until turning off desktop effects and seeing that it updates again. This problem is rare and always goes away after toggling desktop compositing. Since I don't know how much this is a KDE problem and how much it's the drivers, I'm reporting it with both of the teams. My OS is openSUSE Tumbleweed x64. Plasma 5.10.4, MESA 17.1.5, Kernel 4.11.8. My CPU is an Intel core i7 920, my video card is a Radeon R7 370 from Gigabyte (RadeonSI / GCN 1.0 / Pitcairn Islands) and I'm running the 'radeon' driver (no 'amdgpu' support yet).
Created attachment 107095 [details] Screenshot of Skype notification flickering Screenshot of a Skype notification glitching against the Plasma panel. This shows one frame of the interference, the pattern changes constantly causing flickering. Only edit includes removing the message contents from the white area.
please provide output of: qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin supportInformation
Created attachment 107114 [details] Output of "qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin supportInformation"
please try using OpenGL 2 instead of 3.
Created attachment 107123 [details] Xorg.0.log
Created attachment 107124 [details] Xorg.1.log
I've been experiencing a seemingly identical issue for months too. I'm on an Intel GPU, which suggests the problem is in kwin or a shared part of Mesa. When window contents freeze, sometimes they are partially updated, triggering an effect where only some segments/rectangles of the screen see into the updated window. Also, I have the scroll wheel on the window title bar mapped to change window opacity, and doing so always causes the full window to refresh properly. Restarting kwin fixes the problem, temporarily. It would be interesting if the original reporter sees this behavior too to further confirm we're talking about the same problem. I'm on Gentoo Linux amd64, kernel 4.11.8-gentoo (but this has been going on for multiple kernel releases now), Core i7-3820QM.
(In reply to Hector Martin from comment #7) Yes, sounds like the same thing. I missed out the rectangle detail; I noticed that sometimes only certain rectangular areas will update when an event happens near them, while the rest of the application remains drawn the same way.
I'm still seeing this every now and then... very rarely, but apparently it will occur at certain times. I'm curious if anyone else is getting those issues and can confirm them. Is this even a KDE problem or a video driver bug?
Yeah, this hasn't gone away for me. These days I just toggle compositing on and off to fix it, but it still happens every now and then.
This issue somehow still exists and occurs to this day. It's X11 specific, never seen it on Wayland... with WL Plasma still being unstable I have to stick to X for now. It's one of the biggest annoyances I have to deal with: It often feels like a process has frozen as its window contents no longer update, then it starts flickering wildly and I realize it's this thing again... I need to hit Alt + Shift + F12 twice to restart desktop compositing. I recently tried changing all possible options under Configure Desktop - Display and Monitor - Compositor: None of them will resolve this, any setting in there will still cause this to occur. As a reminder I use amdgpu / Mesa. Only way to reduce occurrences is to reboot daily: It typically appears to start happening after 1 to 3 days of continuous uptime.
Do you still flickering and frozen windows still under X11 with latest KWin 5.24.2?
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This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. The bug is now closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME due to lack of needed information. For more information about our bug triaging procedures please read the wiki located here: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!