X on Ideapad 3 flickers at top of screen when playing HD video in Firefox

06 August 2022, 08:52:31

So I've had this problem on and off since before I used Artix on this laptop. (Previously I had Arch, also manually installed.) Most of the time this doesn't happen, but I don't know whether it's updates repeatedly causing a regression, or whether the conditions that provoke it just don't happen that often. Whenever I'm watching certain videos in Firefox, usually on YouTube, one or two rows of pixels flicker black at the top of the screen intermittently... it's too fast to really tell but it looks like it's the zeroth row of pixels and the second row of pixels (so there is a one-row gap between them) flickering rapidly between "off" and whatever value they're supposed to have. This occurs whether there is a window at the top of the screen or if my desktop is visible in that region.

Recently I was watching videos from a YouTube documentary series that's in 4k, and I noticed that the effect was especially pronounced, seeming to synchronize with fast-moving, contrasty visuals in the player (note that the YouTube player was not full-screen nor in contact with the affected region of the screen.) First I wondered if Conky might be the cause, so I stopped it running. No, it remained whenever the video was running and stopped immediately when I paused the video.

I downgraded the video to 720p and immediately the effect stopped as well. So that seems suggestive. Sometimes when I'm watching certain YouTube or Hulu videos the cursor becomes noticeably slower without any "stickiness" which is to say change in acceleration/jerk profile. This makes me a little peeved since my processor has eight threads and I turned down an eighties Ford truck to buy this computer open box from Best Buy.

Right now, here's the stack:
I have a Lenovo IdeaPad 3 17IIL05 (this designates the 17 inch version with Core i5-1035G1). It's running Artix with mainline Linux kernel 5.18.14-artix1-1.

My init is OpenRC. My X11 server is version 1.21.1.4. I'm using flwm-git version 1.16 (...) installed from the AUR as my primary window manager, started from xinit. My Firefox version is 103.0.1-1. I'm not running any sound system besides the ALSA that came with my kernel, though I do have pipewire, pipewire-pulse and wireplumber installed for when I need to run discord. None of them are running at present time and I do not start them automatically. (Been having some dbus problems too, may make a thread on that at some point.)

I keep my system upgraded like a good novice Linux user; typically my policy is to run pacman -Syu once per boot. It has been run sometime this week. Right now I saw on the home page that FFMPEG was rolled out too early by accident, and so I haven't upgraded on this boot as the Artix team advised. I have FFMPEG version 2:5.0.1-3 which appears to be before the affected version, so I rule that out as relevant; just wanted to explain why I haven't upgraded my system in the last few days.

Does anyone know why this is happening and whether it portends any greater system instability? I've googled problems like this and it could be anything from kernel to drivers to codecs to firefox, apparently. I'm just a modestly experienced layperson with a decent working understanding of Linux system architecture but no detailed knowledge of systems coding or anything like that, so I'm in the dark and I really do appreciate any help.

I'll post any logs you ask for, just couldn't think of anything relevant besides full version numbers of my graphics stack.

EDIT: I ran pacman -Syu just to see. As ffmpeg was not on the list I went ahead and let it run, then rebooted when it was done. Kernel is now 5.18.16-artix1-1 but problem is easily replicable by playing a 4k video in YouTube still.