Created attachment 18529 [details] My current X.org log. It's possible that this bug belongs under "dri" or "exa", since both are used for my rotation setup. In any case, here goes. Because of today's Debian kernel package update, I recompiled the Xorg ATI drivers (I use "radeon") and the DRI modules (using the "building" instructions on the dri.freedesktop.org wiki), first updating them to the latest git sources. Now, something interesting happens... If I rotate the screen, everything is normal. Hardware acceleration takes care of screen rotation and everything looks and acts fine. However, if I run a program (I've tried Firefox and OpenOffice Writer), things become garbled. I can't pretend to recognize the basic problem, but whenever a change is made to the screen--cursor moves, something is highlighted, output is displayed, etc.--giant, cascading, garbled, grayish lines, horizontal and vertical, are added to the screen. It's like everything's being displayed in the completely wrong place. (Sometimes entire chunks of the screen, rather than merely garbled lines, will display in a random place.) Then, even if I quit the program, or even if I rotate back and _then_ quit the program (then rotating back again to the portrait mode), the messed-up lines will still appear whenever a change happens. The screen is affected for the rest of my session. (I can do things like use the rubber-band select, or get continuous output from the terminal, if I want these artifacts to occur rapidly.) Rotating back to the normal mode fixes everything... mostly (see "notes"). I have some screenshots of the garbled effect, in case the problem looks familiar. (See attachments.) I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, which means I'm still using X server 1.4.0.90. At first, I thought the problem might be Metacity, and its compositing manager (which I use), but I tried both disabling the compositing manager and updating Metacity using Prevu (in order to build the version used in Ubuntu unstable), and no dice. Later, I might try rolling back to different versions of the "radeon" driver and the DRI modules, to see if I can isolate the problem. My graphics driver is the ATI Radeon Mobility something or another... aaugh! It's been a while since I've had to worry about this. Let's see... lspci says "ATI Technologies Inc M71 [Mobility Radeon X2100]". I believe that's marketed as "Mobility Radeon 2300HD", model number "M71", codename "RV550." It has the R300 3D core, I believe. Let me know if you need anything else! -- A couple of notes after taking the screenshots: It seems as though the screen refreshes before taking each screenshot, so most of the garbling actually disappeared when taking the screenshot. It's like taking a photograph of a vampire! (I used the GNOME screenshot tool.) You can still see some residual garbling in the panel at the top, though. Maybe I should take a screencast video... that would indicate how the artifacts appear as I change what's on the screen. I forgot to mention that it messes with other display things. Text will appear the wrong color, icons will be garbled or be chunks of the wrong parts of the screen, etc. This will persist even after I rotate back. Two screenshots--of me writing this bug report--reflect this change. (One shows how things still looked after rotating back, and the other shows how it _should_ look, that is, how it looked after I refreshed my settings by selecting a different theme in the "Appearance" settings and then changing back to my original theme.) The other shots reflect this problem, too; for instance, the one that appears to be an empty terminal actually shows it dumping the entire contents of my entire directory tree. (Seriously... I needed something that would produce a lot of output.) I should also note that, when a chunk of the screen displays in the wrong place, as I described before, often, it's broken into many vertical (from my view) lines, evenly spaced, unrotated, with many copies of the object repeated in a thin column. I wish I could get a screenshot of that...
Created attachment 18530 [details] My desktop, just after rotation. You can see just a little bit of distortion in the panel
Created attachment 18531 [details] With some changes, the screen becomes more of a mess. I should note that the first screenshot I took ("Screenshot-6.png") was well after I'd done all this before, and the screen--at least, how it looks after rotation--had already been corrupted.
Created attachment 18532 [details] That terminal _is_ dumping the contents of my directory tree
Created attachment 18533 [details] Even after rotating back, icons and text colors are messed up.
Created attachment 18534 [details] This is how it _should_ look; this is how it looked after I refreshed the theme settings.
One more thing! I've found this is indeed a bug with the "radeon" driver, meaning this bug is the right section. I've rolled back to and built the revision 1cf7a5494fa94e8d9f30f9b2905dfbe6d4faa445, "Fix pasto in connector table setup for vga powerbooks," and the bug went away! That means that this bug must have been introduced in the flurry of changes on Monday, August 25 (UTC).
Aha! I figured out which revision is the culprit. It's revision 7daba77ded1c718e93ae8c372a39a6e85228d513, "Convert randr, Xv to a common allocator." That one has the bug, while the previous revision ("Switch to using...") and all the ones I tried before it work fine. Also, all that trial and error allowed me to come up with a good "steps to reproduce" list: 1) Upon starting up the desktop environment, rotate left. 2) Rotate back to normal. 3) Start a program. 4) Rotate left again, and watch the garbled magic. I think it's just reacting whenever there's a sudden change in how the rotated desktop looked from before... that is, it freaks out because you didn't have this huge window open last time the desktop was rotated. But, that's just a guess.
should be fixed in git: 38aa450fce6a91b35c191fd07112490a62cc29c6
Fixed! I'm running the updated driver right now, with no problems. Excellent!
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