Text flickers and stretches in odd patterns

Here’s a screenshot of the calendar: Same stretching on the colored dots that indicate events. Never had anything this strange happen and finding this one quite fascinating.

Screenshot

System Monitor. The pattern changes whenever I hover over a new entry.

I think it’s probably related to your GPU, but amdgpu is a GPL’d kernel driver, so perhaps you can try a different kernel?

Personally I prefer LTS kernels, but your mileage may vary.

I could try a different kernel just to know. Currently I’m on the latest stable one which is 5.12.8.

An observation is this seems to happen with Plasma and Qt5 applications exclusively: I don’t appear to be getting it on GTK, and even in the web browser and other places everything’s fine.

It may be related to the theme you’re using. By the way, is this X11 or Wayland?

Default Plasma and KWin theme (Breeze). X11 session.

That narrows it down to the GPU driver then. :thinking:

Try the 5.10 kernel, and if necessary, try 5.4. Both are LTS kernels, and 5.4 is a pretty good one.

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Same issue as here

Someone close who’s also a Manjaro user confirmed this too last night. They too are on amdgpu, and I understand started seeing it after the latest OS snapshot (+100 package update) like me.

I also wrote about this issue in another topic. It appears there is a regression somewhere, I think perhaps in Mesa or LLVM. I am also using amdgpu driver with AMD R9 390 card.

I am not sure where the issue is. For me, in order to get my system working properly again without these annoying glitches I had to downgrade the following packages, I tried different kernels but the issue still persisted even when using older kernels:

→ lib32-libva-mesa-driver: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
→ lib32-llvm: ignoring package upgrade (11.0.1-2 => 12.0.0-1)
→ lib32-llvm-libs: ignoring package upgrade (11.1.0-1 => 12.0.0-1)
→ lib32-mesa: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
→ lib32-mesa-vdpau: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
→ lib32-vulkan-mesa-layers: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
→ libva-mesa-driver: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
→ llvm-libs: ignoring package upgrade (11.1.0-1 => 12.0.0-1)
→ mesa: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
→ mesa-vdpau: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
→ vulkan-mesa-layers: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)

I don’t know if this helps anyone.

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I have this issue as well. I saw it reported separately here: Graphics in menu items messed up after update

I uploaded screenshots but cannot share media/links directly. You can see at imgur /a/Ak5FL0H

Some additional info: I don’t recall NOT having this issue (been trying out manjaro for about 3 weeks). I installed closed source drivers almost immediately however because steam doesn’t work on the open source drivers for me for some reason (I consider myself fairly linux competent but don’t know much about gpu drivers). Since the big update didn’t fix it I tinkered with things and tried removing the closed source drivers which didn’t fix it, but then I come here to report and see it seems new to everyone else.

If you’ve been trying Manjaro for 3 weeks that explains why you can’t recall NOT having this issue. I’ve had the issue for about a month now ever since we upgraded away from Mesa 21.0.3. Only downgrading a number of graphics related packages allows me to use my system without these glitches. Its an annoying and persistent regression from upstream, I think, that they still haven’t gotten around to fixing. I suppose you also are using AMDGPU driver? The issue seems to only affect certain AMD graphics cards.

Yeah, sorry about missing some details. Behind at work AND we’ve got some house guests! Some people mentioned “this week” so I thought adding my timeline might help. Glad to hear you’ve also got some more details to confirm.

I am using amd radeon r9 290x. Can you share which packages you downgraded to eliminate glitches? I think that might be worth my time :).

Oh just scroll up, I wrote the packages in a previous reply in this very thread. But here they are again:
lib32-libva-mesa-driver: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
lib32-llvm: ignoring package upgrade (11.0.1-2 => 12.0.0-1)
lib32-llvm-libs: ignoring package upgrade (11.1.0-1 => 12.0.0-1)
lib32-mesa: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
lib32-mesa-vdpau: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
lib32-vulkan-mesa-layers: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
libva-mesa-driver: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
llvm: ignoring package upgrade (11.1.0-1 => 12.0.0-1)
llvm-libs: ignoring package upgrade (11.1.0-1 => 12.0.0-1)
mesa: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
mesa-vdpau: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)
vulkan-mesa-layers: ignoring package upgrade (21.0.3-3 => 21.1.2-1)

But I am sure keeping these downgraded will cause its own problems eventually. The best thing is to hope that upstream will figure out this bug and correct it soon.

Yes: Blocking some dependencies from being upgraded can eventually cause problems, as other new packages may require the latest versions and silently stop working if they aren’t there. The only safe route is to pause updating the entire system for a while, but of course that has its own issues and can only be done for a limited time. In this case I can deal with the flickering till it’s resolved, it’s just an annoyance… thank goodness it isn’t anything like a GPU crash.

What does surprise me quite a bit is that so far no one can pinpoint exactly which component is doing it and what the issue in that component is, despite the problem being around for months; We have many people saying “I’m seeing it too” but no one close to the llvm / mesa team who can say “we’re aware of the issue and know what’s causing it”, despite the former usually leading to the later.

My bet is on mesa: A close being who is a streamer, also using Manjaro and OBS Studio, has been having his stream lag for a week and going through Linux hell to fix it. In the end he learned that mesa was the cause: Upon downgrading it and setting the package on ignore to prevent further updates, his stream has been almost flawless. His experience coincides perfectly with this flickering, which may be a completely separate issue though I’m starting to suspect it’s not.

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This on freedesktop’s gitlab appears to be our issue being tracked down w/ mesa.

Reading the thread on the link you provided seems to indicate they are making progress in tracking down the cause of our issue. Hopefully, the next version of mesa will have this issue solved.

Just letting anybody know who is thinking of trying the newest mesa out to see if they solved the issue that mesa 21.1.4 still doesn’t fix the glitchy graphics problem.

Confirming this seems to be resolved as of the latest stable snapshot today, which brings us Mesa 21.1.5. For everyone experiencing this, updating should finally resolve the problem.

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