Bug#575893: xserver-xorg-video-radeon: Occasional flickering

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

R. Bijker wrote:

> The flickering seems to occur most often just after I do some input, but
> again only randomly. Sometimes three times in 5 seconds, sometimes it does
> not happen for minutes. However, there are cases where it happens while I'm
> typing and cases where it happens when idle for a while.
>
> During video playback the flickering happens too. However, more often there
> are short (30-100 pixels or so) white-ish horizontal lines in the video
> output using mplayer. It with both the 'x11' and 'xv' drivers (of mplayer).
> I'm not sure whether this is related or not, they started happening with the
> same version of the video driver.
>
> The flickering is extremely annoying.

Thanks for reporting it.  I don't see any relevant changes since then
in squeeze.  Some basic questions:

 - can you reproduce it with the kernel from sid or experimental?  (It
   should be possible to test with initramfs-tools and linux-base from
   sid or squeeze-backports.)

   If it seems to be fixed in sid: do you remember / could you run a
   quick bisection search using snapshot.debian.org to find which
   kernel fixed it?

   If it seems to be broken in sid:
   - does adding radeon.new_pll=0 to the kernel command line help?
   - any other known workarounds or other weird observations?
   - could you report this upstream at bugs.freedesktop.org, product
     DRI, component DRM/Radeon, with information about your hardware
     (lspci -vnn, dmesg output, Xorg.log) and details about how to
     reproduce it and let us know the bug number so we can track it?

Sorry for the long silence,
Jonathan