So I’ve set up Elementary OS 7 (Ubuntu 22.04 based) on my 7950X3D + ProArt X670E. I’m also doing a vfio setup for Windows, which hopefully is not relevant to this issue.
I’m low on ideas on how to even start debugging “my screen occasionally flashes with a bit of semi-transparent green when I have some youtube video open in a browser even on pause and minimized” or “top ~20% of my screen flickers, or the entire screen flashes, with semi-transparent green when playing videos”
I tried googling and well flickering and flashing immediately point to very different types of issues. Asked around a bit and heard that amdgpu.dpm=0 is a common workaround for similar issues, when I tried it, it made my system lock up on boot I imagine just as it was about to initialize the GPU and change the console font or something like that.
Relevant specs:
7950X3D with the iGPU
amdgpu kernel driver in use
Apparently x11 not wayland, not quite sure why, I assumed this was running wayland
ProArt X670E
Kernel 5.19.0-38-generic
Display is LG CX 4k120 via HDMI at 3840x2160@60
Separately a 4090 for vfio passthrough
VLC seems to be very good at triggering it, I’ve seen others do it as well, sometimes it’s the entire screen, sometimes just a section of it.
WARNING: FLASHING!
Also potentially related, but obviously very different - the top bar with the application launcher, date & time, sound, power, etc. controls has some horizontal alignment flickering when any window is moved in the top ~30% of the screen or so.
It’s starting to smell like the kernel is too old, apparently newer 6.x kernels would have support for the CPU and probably also the iGPU. Unfortunately since I’m on an Ubuntu 22.04 based distro and using ZFS on root, I’m not really able to upgrade.
You need a pretty recent OpenZFS version to support newer kernels
The currently available PPA is not recent enough and the maintainer … isn’t around anymore
There is apparently one guy with a zfs-experimental package, but it doesn’t support 22.04, and it’s from master which is probably too bleeding edge
Building it manually seems to be less than intuitive, after messing around trying to get DKMS to build it for me, I somehow ended up with all my initrd images without the basic ZFS utilities and it just seemed like it was getting worse
I guess I’m just going to have to wait for someone to pick up the pieces of zfs-linux the PPA
I had flashing symptom with my 7950x, though it was white. This was solved by setting amdgpu.sg_display=0 in my kernel params. Maybe it’s a similar issue?
Does not seem to have been the cause of my issues, or then this flag isn’t implemented on 5.19.0 or something like that. I’ve however run into a few different kinds of issues with this now so maybe it will help with some of them.
So, I ended up getting a Tuxedo infinitybook 14 gen 7 as well as this machine, and I wanted to also set it up with a similar ZFS setup. Because of other reasons it seemed it was not going to be easily possible to keep it on an Ubuntu 22.04 based setup, so tried arch instead. When I got it to work on that fine, I decided to migrate the main PC to arch as well.
Now that I’m running kernel 6.2.8 the issues are significantly reduced on the 7950X3D iGPU. There’s still the occasional flash, but it’s the entire screen flashing to black, and it seems unrelated to video playback. As a bonus also got my thunderbolt egpu working with an RX 6600 so might use that for my main display instead and possibly avoid the issue.
