Bug 16782

Summary: Light graphical corruption in Firefox/Iceweasel
Product: xorg Reporter: Tim Allen <screwtape>
Component: Driver/nouveauAssignee: Nouveau Project <nouveau>
Status: RESOLVED NOTOURBUG QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments:
Description Flags
A screenshot of a glitch in action. none

Description Tim Allen 2008-07-20 05:30:47 UTC 
Created attachment 17767 [details]
A screenshot of a glitch in action.

The nouveau driver was added to the Debian experimental repository the other day[1], so I decided to try it out. So far, it's working better than nv, but I've experienced some light graphical corruption in Iceweasel (Debian's build of Firefox). It's superficially similar to some corruption I saw with the "nv" driver[2], but that seemed to be XAA-specific while I hear nouveau is an EXA-based driver.

I'll attach a screenshot of the problem, but in general background-images seem to paint with the wrong origin - sometimes the edges of a web-page will paint in the middle, sometimes the background won't be drawn at all. Selecting text then deselecting it often repairs the damage (or sometimes causes it).

My video-card is a GeForce FX 5200 Ultra ("NV34", says Xorg.0.log), I'm running Debian Unstable on a PowerMac G5, I'm using Metacity with compositing disabled; other system info includes:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (499, 'experimental')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-powerpc64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages xserver-xorg-video-nouveau depends on:
ii  dr 2.3.1+git+20080706+401f77a-1+2.6.25-7 DRM modules for Linux (kernel 2.6.
ii  li 2.7-12                                GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  xs 2:1.4.2-1                             Xorg X server - core server

I've attached a screenshot of the glitch in action; this occurred during page load and occasionally while I was resizing the window. It took me a while to get this screenshot, as defocusing the window was enough to make it redraw and clean itself up.

[1]: http://chris-lamb.co.uk/2008/07/16/nouveau-nvidia-drivers-now-available-in-debian-experimental/
[2]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=482992
Comment 1 Michel Dänzer 2008-07-20 07:18:38 UTC 
Please try a newer X server, e.g. xserver-xorg-core from Debian experimental (though you may need to rebuild the driver against that).
Comment 2 Tim Allen 2008-07-21 05:19:45 UTC 
Unfortunately, experimental seems to currently be set up such that I can use nouveau with the old version of xserver-xorg-core, or nv with the new version of xserver-xorg-core, but not nouveau with the new xserver-xorg-core.

I guess I'll put up with the glitch until newer packages are available for testing.
Comment 3 Danny 2008-07-22 01:38:19 UTC 
just build nouveau from git for a while?

d.
Comment 4 Pekka Paalanen 2009-09-23 05:06:48 UTC 
How is it today?

I'm not sure how old the Dedian packaging is, so testing with all Nouveau components from git is recommended with either the latest released xorg-server or git head.
Comment 5 Tim Allen 2009-09-23 19:47:37 UTC 
It's been a while since I owned the computer I was using when I filed this bug, so I'm afraid I can't test it anymore.

My recollection is that there was some kind of bug in the X server pixmap rendering that libcairo was tickling; Mozilla hacked up their internal copy of libcairo to work around the bug, but the Debian folks built Iceweasel against the official libcairo release.

A reference to the problem on the Debian Iceweasel maintainer's blog:

    http://glandium.org/blog/?p=209

The Mozilla bug in which they hack up their libcairo source:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413583#c3

So although I don't know the current state of the actual underlying bugs, it does seem to have workarounds in place, and it doesn't seem to be nouveau's fault.
Comment 6 Pekka Paalanen 2009-09-24 09:45:59 UTC 
Excellent, thank you for this information.
Let's close this bug.

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