Bug 21124

Summary: nouveau: fonts "chipped" on NV44
Product: xorg Reporter: Marti Raudsepp <marti>
Component: Driver/nouveauAssignee: Nouveau Project <nouveau>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium CC: diver, fatih, philippe.gauthier, swt
Version: git   
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments:
Description Flags
Screenshot of the artifacts
none
Changes with different sub-pixel rendering and hinting style settings none

Description Marti Raudsepp 2009-04-11 03:45:14 UTC
Created attachment 24711 [details]
Screenshot of the artifacts

I'm seeing chipped letters (see screenshot) when using the nouveau driver with my Nvidia GeForce 6200; some of the rightmost pixels of letters are sometimes made transparent. Screenshot: http://www.juffo.org/junk/nouveau-fonts.png

No relevant errors/warnings found in Xorg.0.log

Most, but not all programs exhibit this behavior. Exceptions that I have observed include the URXVT and xterm terminal emulators, and also window titlebars (using xfwm4). All fonts look normal with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers.

Using xf86-video-nouveau from git revision d8545e669aaa4362a236ba2e7231ca27ffdea1bd and libdrm revision fef29358bb407f35b90e8c6ee913e4979786cfd5; compiled using packages from the nouveau Portage overlay.

lspci reports this:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44 [GeForce 6200 TurboCache(TM)] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

This is on a native AMD64 Gentoo system (no insane CFLAGS). Versions:
vanilla-sources-2.6.28.7
xorg-server-1.5.3-r5
cairo-1.8.6-r1
pango-1.22.4
gtk+-2.12.12
Comment 1 Younes Manton 2009-04-11 09:56:46 UTC
Strange, I have a non-TC NV44 and all my fonts look fine. I'm assuming you had no problems previously and a recent update caused this, or is this the first time you've tried Nouveau?

Does your kernel log have any errors?
Comment 2 Maarten Maathuis 2009-04-11 10:09:15 UTC
I'd like to point out that gentoo ships a heavily patches version of xorg-server, 41 patches that affect exa. It's possible a mistake was made in the backporting somewhere. I'm not saying it is the issue, just consider it when searching for the answer.
Comment 3 Marti Raudsepp 2009-04-11 23:40:44 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)
> or is this the first time you've tried Nouveau?
Yes.

> Does your kernel log have any errors?
None.
Comment 4 Younes Manton 2009-04-12 07:05:33 UTC
Maybe you can build the server from the git overlay to see if it's a Gentoo patch causing it? If it's not an issue with Gentoo's xserver it might be an issue with TurboCache variants in the driver.
Comment 5 Francesco Marella 2009-05-03 02:33:50 UTC
Just to let you know that I saw chipped letters too when using the nouveau driver with my Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 and using:

Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty)
kernel 2.6.28
xserver-xorg-core (2:1.6.0-0ubuntu14)
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (1:0.0.10~git+20090404+11be9a9-0ubuntu1)
nouveau-kernel-source (0.0.11+git20090404-0ubuntu1)
libdrm-nouveau1 (2.4.5-0ubuntu4)
Comment 6 Patrick 2009-07-08 20:26:12 UTC
Created attachment 27508 [details]
Changes with different sub-pixel rendering and hinting style settings

I have the exact same problem on Fedora 11 (just upgraded from Fedora 10).

Hardware:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7100 GS (rev a1)

Fedora's version string:
0.0.12-40.20090528git0c17b87.fc11

It changed when I played around with KDE's "sub-pixel rendering" and "hinting style" settings, see for yourself in the attached PNG.
Comment 7 Philippe Gauthier 2010-06-04 12:35:04 UTC
I can't see the problem anymore if I am using the latest Git packages from Ubuntu's "xorg-edgers" packages. These package have the following X server version code:

xorg-server 2:1.8.1.901+git20100602+server-1.8-branch.b65c5be1-0ubuntu0sarvatt4~lucid

Current video hardware:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G72 [GeForce 7300 SE/7200 GS] (rev a1)
Comment 8 Vlado Plaga 2010-08-17 05:48:12 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)

> It changed when I played around with KDE's "sub-pixel rendering" and "hinting
> style" settings, see for yourself in the attached PNG.

Thank you very much, Patrick! I now had similar problems with damaged fonts (most often in letters like "l", "i", or symbols like ":" and "." for about half a year!

Changing the sub-pixel rendering settings in KDE (System Settings/ Application Appearance/ fonts/) made fonts on my system look great again! I had to chose "deactivated" (looks ugly) or "activated" instead of the preset "system default".

The problems often only occurred after I had started a few applications and used them for some time. I tried different operating systems (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu) with different versions of nouveau. With the "nv" driver I newer had such problems. I'm so glad this seems fixed for me now!
Comment 9 Ilia Mirkin 2013-08-19 16:40:53 UTC
It appears that this bug report has laid dormant for quite a while. Sorry we haven't gotten to it. Since we fix bugs all the time, chances are pretty good that your issue has been fixed with the latest software. Please give it a shot. (Linux kernel 3.10.7, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.9, mesa 9.1.6, or their git versions.) If upgrading to the latest isn't an option for you, your distro's bugzilla is probably the right destination for your bug report.

In an effort to clean up our bug list, we're pre-emptively closing all bugs that haven't seen updates since 2011. If the original issue remains, please make sure to provide fresh info, see http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Bugs/ for what we need to see, and re-open this one.

Thanks,

The Nouveau Team

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