An update of the user-space intel driver causes random visual glitches on my laptop. The most obvious and reproducible issue is when switching between tabs in Firefox, the old tab is still being displayed after the new tab has been selected. Most of the time, everything is OK, but in maybe 5% of the cases, the bug happens. If moving the mouse over the web page, some items will be updated, showing a mix of the old tab and new tab. Switching to another tab or between virtual desktops will fix the display completely, until the next time it happens.

There are no error messages in the log when the problem happens.

I have bisected the problem to this commit:

commit 1f6dfc9df6780bd3768bf065156b6e8dae05b80c
Author: Chris Wilson
Date:   Tue Aug 2 09:06:50 2016 +0100

    sna: Only flush GPU bo for a damage event

The issue is still present in the latest version of the driver (2.99.917-768-g2452066b.)

My hardware:
Lenovo Thinkpad X230 running SLED 12 SP2 x86_64. My display is connected to the docking station over DisplayPort, lid is closed. Graphics chipset is 3rd Gen Core, PCI ID 8086:0166.

Relevant packages:
kernel-default-4.4.49-92.11.1.x86_64
kernel-firmware-20160516git-19.4.noarch
xorg-x11-server-7.6_1.18.3-64.1.x86_64

The xf86-video-intel driver is configured with:
./configure --host=x86_64-suse-linux-gnu --build=x86_64-suse-linux-gnu --program-prefix= --disable-dependency-tracking --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc --datadir=/usr/share --includedir=/usr/include --libdir=/usr/lib64 --libexecdir=/usr/lib --localstatedir=/var --sharedstatedir=/usr/com --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --disable-dependency-tracking --disable-backlight-helper --enable-kms-only --enable-uxa