Screen flickers white when gpu(presumably) switches from integrated to descrete graphics

Support Graphics & Display
1

An issue that I believe is related is the Quadro T2000 in my Thinkpad P1. Randomly(usually when something graphically intensive starts to happen like redrawing windows) the screen will briefly flicker.

I have disabled the open source drivers, am on a 5.8 kernel, and installed the nvidia 350xx bumblebee driver for use with my igpu.

I know it would most likely be solved if I used x11 over wayland, but the wayland style gesture support is crucial for my workflow, and libinput gestures don’t work as well.

If anyone has any ideas as to what is causing this, I would love to know. It isn’t breaking anything, its just annoying to see a quick flicker, and since the flicker is pure white it does hurt the eyes a bit lol. More importantly, its the last thing on my fix list until all the laptops features(Facial recognition, fingerprint, dolby atmos) are working 100% perfectly, and that’s driving me crazy!

2

Nvidia + iGPU are a bad combo in linux. Nvidia is not well supported and until they open source their drivers nobody can do real fixing but them.

You tried that? Does it flicker or not ?

3

Could you set it to always use the external GPU? I remember that there was an issue with GFX switching on my 2012 MBP Retina where eventually the switching would burn out some logicboard component. So I deactivated it and left it on the discrete NVIDIA GPU. Battery life wasn’t that much worse TBH.

I’m not familiar with Lenovo bios, but you might be able to disable the Intel GFX there. Otherwise someone else on the forums might be able to help you blacklist the device (or something like that).

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