Flickering Cursor

#1

Hi,

Any clue/hint/fix regarding X11 flickering cursor ? HWCursor ?

rock-5b-debian-bullseye-xfce4-arm64-20221122-1158-gpt.img.xz / 5.10.110-34-rockchip-gca15bbe36e6c

Alex

#2

https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b/

Use armbian jammy + panfork-mesa instead. It works just fine.

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#3

Same here on jammy

#4

Cursor is blinking for me aswell when running glmark for example, but only when 3d operations are going on. With 2d tuxes it does not flash. Using today’s panfork.

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#5

I can confirm, latest armbian panfork, it is still doing this.

#6

Registering the hardware cursor in dtb can solve this problem
Based on https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/commit/473a8fb13d5845b42151d045cc48284607ab0f38
I did https://github.com/ChisBread/linux-orangepi/commit/63eb2dd31f886dcdb3f8d4d595c41f2a12afce2f# for orange pi 5
I believe it also works on rock 5b

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#7

definitely worth trying ! thanks for your feedback :slight_smile:

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#8

I’ve actually gone and tried this after digging through the driver and dts tree to see why no hardware cursor was available.

I suspect it works fine if you’re only running one or maybe two displays, but it fails with 3.

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#9

Hi bread, not familiar enough with linux to be able to patch it myself. Do you think these updates will make it to regular jammy updates eventually?

#10

Waiting for this PR to be merged, but maybe it will be closed https://github.com/radxa/kernel/pull/50

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#11

I have X11 working and i don’t have the flickering cursor. I always thought this issue would be on Wayland only.
In what circumstance this happens?

We can have two scenarios:

  1. X11, Wayland, GBM with mali blob
  2. X11, Wayland with panfork

Update:
I currently use ssh session to do most of the things, and not always at the desktop. But now paying attention to the cursor, i can see the cursor flickering a bit while moving it, but almost imperceptible, is that the flickering you are experiencing?

My scenario is 1)

#12

Can you disclose what displays you are using and which port is connected to?

#13

2 HP 27q displays, 2560x1440, attached to both HDMI ports.
A no-name 1920x1080 display, connected to the USB-C port with a dongle.

#14

Mind sharing a picture of the connection?

Here is my cursor: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iQ9H_gYYxe1uMjp7EFPmjZ9cXJMldUkp/view?usp=sharing

#15

works perfectly, may requires some adjustments like Sarah said, but clearly fixes the issue for now in a basic dual screen setup.

#16

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/155CXeKE0Yc71yHKKLDGxIQ8JDoXaInBY?usp=sharing

Pictures are my monitor setup and the Rock5b with it’s connections. Video is (poorly shot) how the screen responds when the cursor properties are enabled.

Connections:
Left display: USB-C dongle. 1920x1080.
Center display: right HDMI port. 2560x1440 with rotation.
Right display: left HDMI port. 2560x1440 without rotation.

All displays are 60hz, though I don’t suspect that makes too much difference here.

The log is the kernel & system messages, if that’s helpful.

Essentially: USB-C and left HDMI fail to output video - but the cursor is perfectly smooth. The center display, which was misconfigured because I couldn’t see to login and signed into a second account on the machine, displayed my desktop otherwise correctly, until I moved the cursor to those other displays.

#17

Ha ha, I got dizzy following your cursor.
You are on Wayland. I don’t have any experience with Wayland. vop2 kept crashing i think. The entire screen flickered.

I can only comment on your boot log, if you allow me, that does not look good. I think you need at least 27W. I don’t push my Rock 5B that much. I can now use the 65W PD on my setup.

#18

Nope, that’s Xorg. Wayland had its own issues - maybe recent changes have fixed this, but GNOME would shit a brick starting a Wayland session.

Edit: maybe that user was Wayland. I couldn’t see which account I signed in with. (boot.log says it was.)

I’ll double-check again once I completely disable Wayland on here.

As far as the PSU goes: that’s a 65W USB-C brick from a laptop. sensors reports that it’s configured for 58W, which makes sense as some of it is drained off the top by the adapter in the USB-C port.

Last up on here: Yep, it was Wayland. gdm is starting up with Wayland enabled, leaving me with mangled displays. Dropping into a console and using “startx”, it came up fine. Oh well, it’s not like I ever got Wayland working properly anyway - even when I got close, there were things that absolutely didn’t work.

#19

Ok. You should check for the latest xserver fix, but i think you could try some other kernel and see if does not crash that much, eventually, i will try dual screen, but i can’t help much.

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#20

Yep, see my last edit. I read my log and found that it was, in fact, Wayland. I went to a console and explicitly ran ‘startx’ (since the text-mode console worked just fine) and it all came up and is working.