1688182 - Random UI/page flickers in response to actions (Linux)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect, P3)

Description

[giul.mus]

Attachment: Black rectangles over the UI

Since yesterday (Nightly ver. 2021-01-20) I've had the Firefox UI flicker randomly sometimes. I see:

• large white or black rectangles appearing over the page or the navigation bar
• icons in other tabs flickering
• rarely, tabs disappearing
• as I was typing this report, a small black rectangle sometimes appeared, or parts of the blue form border disappeared

(I attached some examples.)

These flickers always appear in response to actions, eg. while typing or while scrolling the page, and only for 1 second at most. Also, they do not always occur, there are periods when they don't.

Please tell me if there's more context I can add. I'm using Linux with X11 and an integrated GPU.

Comment 1

[giul.mus]

While reporting the bug I also had parts of another page render over the current one, see new attachment.

Comment 2

[giul.mus]

Attachment: Parts of a different page rendering over the current one

Comment 3

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

Thanks for the report. Please open menu Help > Troubleshooting Information and attach the information from that page as file here.

Comment 4

[giul.mus]

Attachment: support.json

Here it is, I exported it to json since I can't seem to switch Firefox to english.

Comment 5

[Nicolas Silva [:nical]]

Looks similar to bug 1688762. Maybe related to picture caching invalidation or the interaction of that with partial preset. Glenn any idea ?

Comment 6

[giul.mus]

These flickers eventually turned into GPU crashes so I opened an issue at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/2986. It depends on the kernel in some part since downgrading to Linux 5.10.8 works, so I'm not sure if the problem lies in Firefox specifically. It likely isn't related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1688762 though.

Comment 7

[Glenn Watson [:gw]]

This sounds more like a mesa / kernel bug then, if it's causing GPU hangs. If the flickering is correlated, it's hopefully the same underlying issue.

There are a few things we might be doing in WR that could potentially trigger a GPU hang from GL, but it seems unlikely given that it doesn't seem like a more widespread problem.

Andrew, thoughts on what we should do here? Worth trying to reproduce locally if we have the same hardware, or do we see what happens with the upstream bug?

Comment 8

[Glenn Watson [:gw]]

I noticed that the mesa version is 20.3.3, the same as in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1687993, possibly related as they are both Intel GPUs on that same mesa version?

Comment 9

[Andrew Osmond [:aosmond] (he/him)]

From the linked issue @ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/2986:

Still there in Linux 5.10.15, Mesa 20.3.4. It also occurs in other applications (Chrome, mpv).

Happening with Chrome too.

Comment 10

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Most likely unrelated to Firefox.

Comment 11

[giul.mus]

The problem was eventually resolved after a Linux update.