Bug 85439

Summary: Intensive text (XTerm) screen flickering (during contents change)
Product: xorg Reporter: Zbigniew <zb>
Component: Driver/RadeonAssignee: xf86-video-ati maintainers <xorg-driver-ati>
Status: RESOLVED MOVED QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.5 (2009.10)   
Hardware: x86 (IA32)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description Zbigniew 2014-10-25 12:06:31 UTC 
After switching from NVidia (with their proprietary "closed" driver) to Radeon with kernel stock driver I noticed somewhat irritating thing: in XTerm windows, when there is larger amount of text output, much more "flickering" can be noticed, making the output barely readable. Most probably it's somehow related to the way XTerm's windows contents is refreshed; not sure.

It can be especially easy seen during longer compilation, when there are many lines of output scrolled - but it's irritating even during use of text-based programs using ncurses library, like mutt for example, or Slackware's pkgtool.

Well this one can be detected actually by direct comparison - and the best way would be to use slower machine for this, to increase the effect. But when I see the way ncurses-based apps cooperate with your driver, it seems, they mostly 0- after start - first make completely unnecessary refresh of the present XTerm window content, and only then they output their own screen (you can see this when starting mutt, and when using pkgtool). No idea, how this is related to your driver, just I didn't notice such unpleasant effect formerly with NVidia.
Comment 1 Alex Deucher 2014-10-26 18:14:46 UTC 
What chip is this?  Please attach your xorg log and dmesg output.
Comment 2 Zbigniew 2014-10-26 23:38:06 UTC 
The same data, as I gave in comments to 
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85423
Comment 3 Martin Peres 2019-11-19 07:48:18 UTC 
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

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