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FedKad
Asked: 2024-11-18 00:46:48 +0800 CST

Occasional screen flicker after upgrade to 24.10

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This is an almost 6 years old notebook originally installed with Ubuntu 18.10 and after that upgraded every six months to the latest "normal" Ubuntu release.

I haven't met with this problem before. After yesterday's upgrade from 24.04 to 24.10, I started having occasional screen flickers (once or several times successively for almost a time period of a second the screen goes black for a few milliseconds).

At the time of the flicker I have the following in system's syslog:

2024-11-17T19:12:36.160592+03:00 _myhostname_ kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun

I am currently using the nvidia-driver-560 driver, but I tried the others (X.Org X server and 535-server), with the same result.

I don't know if it a coincidence or not, however after upgrading to 24.10 it started taking tooooo much time (almost two minutes with peak CPU usage) to display the Additional Drivers tab in Software & Updates:

enter image description here

The same for the below command:

# time ubuntu-drivers devices 
== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00001C8Dsv00001D05sd00001042bc03sc00i00
vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
model    : GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile]
driver   : nvidia-driver-560 - distro non-free recommended
driver   : nvidia-driver-535-server - distro non-free
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin


real    1m52.061s
user    0m36.741s
sys 1m15.267s

I tried to set first i915.modeset=0 and then i915.modeset=1 in /etc/default/grub followed with

$ sudo update-grub

and system reboot, but it didn't help either.

  • Choosing Wayland during login may solve the problem. However, I am not going to use Wayland, because Wayland is not mature enough and has many problems that Xorg does not.¹

  • Choosing NVIDIA (Performance Mode) seems to solve the problem. However, I wasn't able to test for an extended period, because of another problem mentioned here.

  • Disabling NVIDIA and choosing onboard graphics adapter Intel® UHD Graphics 630 does not solve the problem.

¹ I can create a long list of the problems and missing functionalities of Wayland; but this is not in the scope of this question.

System Details Report

Report details
  • Date generated: 2024-11-17 19:58:33
Hardware Information:
  • Hardware Model: MONSTER ABRA A5 V13.2
  • Memory: 24.0 GiB
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-8750H × 12
  • Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)
  • Graphics 1: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050
  • Disk Capacity: 756.2 GB
Software Information:
  • Firmware Version: N.1.10
  • OS Name: Ubuntu 24.10
  • OS Build: (null)
  • OS Type: 64-bit
  • GNOME Version: 47
  • Windowing System: X11
  • Kernel Version: Linux 6.11.0-9-generic
drivers

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    After upgrading to 24.10, I used to get black screen when the cursor passed through specific pixels at the mid bottom of the screen, reverting to normal after moving the cursor away. The screen used to also flicker at unspecified conditions, but after the following solution (found here), both problems seem to be fixed.

    Create a file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel_flicker_fix.conf with this content (worked in my case with Intel Graphics):

    Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel Graphics"
    Driver "intel"
    Option "TripleBuffer" "true"
    Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

    Reboot.

    • 1