Hey Solus community,
today I installed Solus 4.4 with the Gnome desktop and I am really impressed by it. Everything worked very well out of the box and I like the tweaks the dev team has done regarding the desktop. A big thank you for that!
However, there is one problem occurring occasionally: Sometimes parts of the desktop start to flicker, not often but still noticeable. At first I thought this would just affect the activities overview in Gnome, but it also happened with the full desktop. To show you the problem I recorded a short video, which I uploaded to imgur:
Some months ago I had a rather similar issue on a Debian based distribution called Siduction. Back then, my screen suffered from occasional flickering as well, although it sometimes looked a little different compared to Solus' flickering. Believing that the issue was the same I applied the same fix, the Siduction community suggested me, consisting in adding a boot parameter. So I followed the official Solus documentation to add the parameter "intel_iommu=intgpu_off". I issued three commands:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/kernel/cmdline.d
echo 'intel_iommu=intgpu_off' | sudo tee /etc/kernel/cmdline.d/40_intel_iommu.conf
sudo clr-boot-manager update
The file "/etc/kernel/cmdline.d/40_intel_iommu.conf" now contains the following line:
intel_iommu=intgpu_off
Sadly, this method didn't resolve the issue, so I'd be very grateful for any help you could suggest. Here are some information regarding my hardware and installation:
According to the Gnome infocenter:
Manufacturer: HP
Hardware model: HP EliteBook 820 G3
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-6500U × 4
Graphics: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 520 (SKL GT2)
lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 08)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] (rev 07)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 21)
00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Thermal subsystem (rev 21)
00:15.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 21)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP CSME HECI #1 (rev 21)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 21)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #2 (rev f1)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #4 (rev f1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP LPC Controller (rev 21)
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PMC (rev 21)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio (rev 21)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus (rev 21)
00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I219-V (rev 21)
01:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS522A PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 (rev 3a)
cat /etc/os-release:
NAME="Solus"
VERSION="4.4"
ID="solus"
VERSION_CODENAME=harmony
VERSION_ID="4.4"
PRETTY_NAME="Solus 4.4 Harmony"
ANSI_COLOR="1;34"
HOME_URL="https://getsol.us"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/contributing/getting-involved"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://dev.getsol.us/"
LOGO="distributor-logo-solus"
Best regards and thank you for Solus,
Fabian