GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 665527
gnome shell with current nvidia drivers and quadro NVS 140 has severe refresh issues in text console
Last modified: 2012-01-21 00:01:22 UTC
The combination of gnome-shell's compositioning and my quadro NVS 140M GPU and current nvidia driver (290.10) result in severe text console refresh issues. I do not have the problem with nvidia 173.x. I do not have the issue with the current nvidia drivers with ubuntu unity+compiz. It's hard to explain, but I will try. When in a terminal (xterm,uxterm,gnome-terminal), it doesn't refresh properly. For example, I can be in VIM, and I'll jump to the bottom of the file with G, and the text does not update all the way. Half the page will be blank, and as I move the cursor, that line will update. Also, if I click on the window border to resize, it immediately refreshes the entire window properly.
I tried to record a screencast of this using Ctrl+Shift+Alt+r, and I found that it doesn't happen when being recorded. I reproduced the issue with a partially drawn terminal, and as soon as I started the screencast, it refreshed itself.
That means it's an issue with clipped redraws. I'm suspecting that this: http://git.gnome.org/browse/mutter/commit/?id=2dc5693c60a2952fdb703098c5e50d80eb976f86 doesn't apply to the NVIDIA drivers. As far as I'm aware, to solve this on the NVIDIA driver we would have to implement the NVIDIA fence extension.
If there is anything I can do to provide more data, I am of course more than willing.
I have an implementation of fence extension patches I'll probably post within the next few days. But I wasn't seeing this behavior when testing without the patches, so I don't directly now if they will fix the problem or not. (I got a little stalled on these patches because of some different rendering/performance issues with gnome-terminal and the NVIDIA proprietary drivers that were muddying testing. Switching tabs in gnome-terminal appeared to be very slow.)
I tested current versions of ubuntu (11.10) and Fedora 16 and both had the same issue on my laptop, However, my desktop with a different nvidia card and the same driver does not have the problem at all, tested with the same distros. So, it seems to be a combination of gnome-shell's compositioning, the current nvidia drivers, and the Nvidia card I'm using in my laptop (NVS 140M Quadro).
Me suffers on Fedora 16 as well using driver version 290.10. My machine is powered by a GTX 460m. That is NVC0 generation @Gregory: What GPU powers your desktop?
I have the same issue since I updated to Fedora 15 (and then 16). Sometimes it seems like restarting gnome-shell will help mitigating the issue (making it less reproducible). As a workaround, I am now using roxterm and it seems like it doesn't suffer the same problem. Not sure what's the difference between gnome-terminal and roxterm but hope that may help point out the root cause.
Please mark this bug as a duplicate of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664858
Chris Fong: I've just built ROXTerm on openSUSE 12.1 and it has the same issues, just like Konsole and Gnome Terminal. Probably moving to KDE until this pain gets resolved.
Not sure what are the differences between your build and the original one from fedora 16 (ROXTerm 1.21.2), I haven't seen the same issue again on roxterm since I start using it (almost 3 weeks now).
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 664858 ***