XWayland Flicker

Hi I’m creating this thread to separate out the flicker issues I’m having from the rest of the v3 conversation.

You can see the original post here:

And a response from @josch with a similar flicker issue and asking if I think the mouse is entering text into the terminal:

I’ll respond to that here. Firstly I think the issue in your video is the same thing, I image there are two back buffers, one completely black, and the other with the grey background set. When you move the mouse it does a dirty rect update on the buffer, then paints that on the screen. It alternates between the buffers, that’s why it flickers. It’s drawing to the black buffer because you can see the trail behind the mouse.

I don’t think the mouse is typing text into xterm, i think it’s doing the same buffer thing. You can see in this video, that i enter a few commands and when moving the mouse they all flicker, not just the current line. Then when i drag to highlight them, it somehow corrects both buffers, so moving the mouse does not flicker (until more text gets added).

I can trigger the same thing in the settings app. After typing in the search box, the bottom section changes, then when i move the mouse an old image form the bottom section flickers.

I’m guessing that the code is not expecting double buffering?

Thanks for your help! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to assist!

Hi, as I wrote in the other threat, I can confirm this issue on my own unit. Just as a hunch I compiled and installed mesa 2ebf4e984b51825c37562e0221bde327188e3eaf as it was done before sysimage-v3. Just to be sure I deleted etnaviv_dri.so, libGL.so and all the other shared libraries from mesa from my /usr/lib so that my system would definitely use the libraries I compiled in /usr/local/lib. But the problem persisted. So maybe this is not a mesa issue?

Just to follow up another comment I missed on the previous thread:

but if you had updated your kernel and mesa in v2 to their current versions you would run into the exact same issue

I have just tried this now, installing v2 and updating to latest (after changing the repository from ftp.de.debian.org). And I do not get the flicker.

After installing v3 and updating to latest I do get the flicker.

I assume that gives more support to it not being mesa, if both builds are running the same version. But I’m guessing there as i don’t really know things haha.

I installed other packages and broke wmaker. Trying to get it back has been a huge struggle. I had to download the Windowmaker source code and compile. This was also a pain point. I only get a grey screen and no widgets and it flickers. Is there an image I can download. I already tried the GitHub for mkimage.sh. Took all day to build wmaker just does not work and neither does gnome

On v2 after installing some packages and autoremoving some “unused” packages I could no longer launch xwayland.

This thread had the fix, apt install llvm-11*:

The grey screen issue happens for me occasionally, and I have restart and try again. In my limited testing it does seem to happen more often on v3 than v2.

Is there a reason you are using mkimage.sh instead of just downloading a prebuilt image?

where is the prebuilt image? I have looked everywhere. I can’t find. Just a bunch of 404s

You should be able to grab the builds here:

In the list you can see sysimage-v3 and sysimage-v2 and on the right side of those rows there’s a button with 3 dots, and you can download build:archive from there.

I assume this is where I got my v2 build from. It is certainly where I got the latest v3 build from.

i have another issue with the image I downloaded.

udev            1.7G     0  1.7G   0% /dev
tmpfs           394M  912K  393M   1% /run
/dev/mmcblk1p2  8.6G  7.7G  479M  95% /
tmpfs           2.0G   15M  2.0G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
/dev/mmcblk1p1  471M   57M  390M  13% /boot
tmpfs           394M   28K  394M   1% /run/user/1000

Its a 32G micro sd why do I not have any space left. I should have well over 16G in root directory. When i add all this up
it mounts to 12G.

What’s missing?

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/mmcblk1: 28.33 GiB, 30416044032 bytes, 59406336 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x72746e6d

Device         Boot   Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk1p1         8192  1007615   999424  488M 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk1p2      1007616 19439615 18432000  8.8G 83 Linux

One you are booted and running on the SD card, gnome-disks is the easiest way to resize the partition to use all the available space.

Select the correct SD card on the left, and select select the MNTREFORM partition on the right. Then click the little cog and select “Resize…”