[TRACKING] Fedora Freezes and Flickering on newer Kernels

Yep, I also experience random flickering and jittering and occasional ~2 second freezing on my fedora system. I only recently got my laptop so I can’t speak for older kernel versions.
For me it doesn’t happen all the time and I thought it was fixed after I implemented the workaround found here but it recently just happened again.

There’s also the issue with the latest kernel 5.19.12 that causes the screen to not work but that has its own topic here

@slothlike Did you remove the old intel driver (xorg-x11-drv-intel) mentioned earlier in the other thread? It might be getting in the way. Hard freezing on Fedora 36 with the new 12th gen system - #71 by Nicholas_La_Roux

@Aggraxis No, but now I just did; will update if the issue persists.
To clarify, “options i915 enable_psr=0” did seem to solve the hard freezes that I would get randomly where I would need to force a reboot. What continued was the occasional flickering and short display freezes. I thought it might have been an issue with wayland but if removing the old driver fixes it then that’s great.
Thanks for the help.

When I boot 5.19.12 I get the flickering everyone else is describing and if I boot 5.19.11 it goes away. But the really weird thing is that when I first booted 5.19.12 I didn’t notice the problem because I was using an external monitor, so it ran overnight.

When I finally noticed the problem I assumed it was the new kernel but booting 5.19.11 didn’t make the problem go away. It was still flickering! Even a power-off/power-on cycle didn’t fix it completely. Booting from the installer live iso I originally used had the same problem. I assumed I had some hardware problem. Running 5.19.11 for a while eventually made the flickering go away.

What a weird problem!

You mean the pixels in the top 5 rows get “random” colors for a fraction of a second and then become normal again? I see exactly this on my 12th gen on Arch Linux, and I’m pretty I’ve seen this with already earlier with kernels < 5.19.8. (Always wanted to report this here and I already wondered why there are no other threads about it.)

It just got worse after a kernel update to 5.19.12. I did the update today, so I’m not entirely sure if this is related to the update. But today I saw seen this flicker for the first time even on the full screen but also sometimes only the top 5 rows (even in the same boot). I can post a video later if people are interested.

The flickers seem to happen more under GPU load but they’re not really cleanly reproducible. No messages in the syslog when I see the flicker. Only the internal screen flickers. Happens on both battery and AC.

I got the 5.19.12 update today, and it outright killed my ability to log in. It’s like it couldn’t set the display mode properly. I just left a post in another thread outlining how to recover if your symptoms progress to that state:

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Thanks, same issue on arch. I thought I am going crazy - none of my recovery mechanisms worked, started thinking I have hardware issue…

You mean the pixels in the top 5 rows get “random” colors for a fraction of a second and then become normal again?

I experience the same issue on Fedora 36 with Gnome, but only when waking up from suspend. It seems to be more severe, the longer the laptop has been sleeping. In some cases the flickering goes away, but sometimes only a reboot fixes the problem. Does anyone else have this problem?

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Just to follow up from my previous comment:

I’m still experiencing the issue. Couple of things to note:

  1. The flickering/freezing seems to get more intense if I’m trying to watch videos.
  2. OBS recordings don’t capture the issue at all. Even when my screen completely freezes, when I watch the recording it shows my mouse moving

@Philip_O I did feel like it’s more likely to happen after waking up from suspend. Initially I thought it only happened after suspending, but I’ve recently experienced it a couple of times even when I never put my laptop to sleep.
Also, yes I found that it does sometimes go away if I just ignore it for a while.

[quote=“Philip_O, post:10, topic:23063, full:true”]

You mean the pixels in the top 5 rows get “random” colors for a fraction of a second and then become normal again?

I experience the same issue on Fedora 36 with Gnome, but only when waking up from suspend. [/quote]

Fwiw, I often see this when booting normally (no suspend). It seems to happen more frequently under heavy GPU load.

The issue is still there btw on Kernels all the way up to 5.19.15.
I just installed .16, let’s see how this one goes.
I agree with previous people that it happens more often after the laptop is woken up from suspend, but I also see it randomly upon a clean boot.

Just noting I have the same issue here. It seems to only occur after a suspend, and doesn’t happen all the time.

I’m on 6.0.6-arch1 (Arch Linux), with Gnome + Wayland.

I suspect it may be related to Hard freezing on Fedora 36 with the new 12th gen system - which I was also having issues with.

I also have these weird flickering issues. I’m running Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS with kernel 6.0.6-76060006-generic, X11, Gnome 42.4

12th Gen i7-1280P.

I get both the top 5 rows of pixels glitching out sometimes (random colors/static) AND the flickering on the left side (but only on the internal display).

@TermoZour The flickering issues you may be having there could be due to using x11 instead of wayland, and possibly due to the custom CPU scheduler that System76 uses with Pop!_OS. That said, let me know if switching to wayland gets rid of that for you. I found an open issue on the Pop!_OS github here that may be relevant.

@GeoStreber Hello from the Discord and now the Forums! I’m running Fedora 37 on my 11th gen Framework, in wayland, with no flickering. That said, if you’re running a 6.0.x kernel and are using the wayland compositor, you shouldn’t have any flickering issues currently. Go ahead and update your install from the terminal if you can, and let me know how things are looking if on a 6.0.x. release. 5.19.x kernels are currently EOL and won’t be supported by the kernel developers going forward unless a distro maintains them like Ubuntu is. The 6.0.x kernels have better support for the new weird e/p thing Intel is doing in 12th gen, so give em a shot!

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@Alex_S it just so happened that today I decided to pull the trigger and switch to Wayland. I’ve had no flickering after restarts or resuming from suspend.

Still running the exact same kernel version.

I did spot some glitching from time to time. First 5 rows of pixels of my internal display would get random colors. But those are rare and I can’t seem to point out why they happen.

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@Alex_S Speaks the truth on this. 6.x kernels are where it’s at with Fedora 37.

Regarding the occasional glitching, I can’t seem to reproduce this myself. I’d look to anything attached (external monitors if relevant), and check dmesg as well.

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I still have the issue on Fedora 37 using 6.0.8 at the moment. Every now and then, the top 5 or so lines just flicker in random colours. The issue exists only on the internal screen, not only any external monitors, and it cannot be captured with screen capture software.

Please logout, at login select Xorg and see if it continues there. Wayland may be bugging out.

Also if you have any additional extensions enabled in GNOME, please try disabling them for testing.

I’m running openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE (X11) with the latest kernel, and I’ve been experiencing similar issues. Specifically, the screen will occasionally freeze over and over again for a time. I’ve tried setting kernel parameters like intel_idle.max_cstate=3 per others’ suggestions, but they haven’t completely rectified the issue. I haven’t experienced the issue yet on Ubuntu, and probably won’t since I only tested it briefly, but yeah… I really wish I knew what was causing this.
For my full config:
Mainboard: i5-1240p
SSD: SN850
RAM: 1 stick of Crucial 16gb RAM as sold by Framework (idk the exact model)
Kernel version: 6.0.8-1 default

I know that openSUSE isn’t an officially supported distro but I’ve seen community posts suggesting that it basically works almost as well as the officially supported distros. And judging by this post, I would guess the issue is not exclusive to openSUSE.

For a visualization of this issue, here is what it looks like. My mouse might be a bit hard to follow but notice how the screen contents briefly shift up vertically after every freeze.

HI there,
I just saw this thread. I posted similar issue with kernel 6.0 in another thread about testing 6.0 kernel.
I have now gave up using anything else than 5.15 kernel.
The latest kernel 6.0.8 doesn t give graphic glitch on my ubuntu 22.04 but it seems to increase my chargee loop bug.

What I had with previous 6.0 kernels was 4 lines of white pixels flickering at the top of the screen continually