stellarium flickers using hardware rendering in linux window managers such as cinnamon

[joequant]

Expected Behaviour

Stellarium should produce an non-flickering image

Actual Behaviour

stellarium flickers on a window manager like cinnamon on linux in hardware rendering mode. The window seems
to go black and does a redraw. The software works fine when the window manager is in software rendering mode

Steps to reproduce

System

• Stellarium version: 0.21.2
• Operating system: Mageia linux 9
• Graphics Card: Intel using i915 driver and modesetting x11 server
• Screen type (if applicable): Resolution, HighDPI, scaling

Logfile

If possible, attach the logfile log.txt from your user data directory. Look into the Guide for its location.

[github-actions]

Thanks for adding your first issue to Stellarium. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

[joequant]

Appears to have something to do with this issue.

https://www.reddit.com/r/opengl/comments/moxt4v/flickering_problem_when_rendering_opengl/

somewhere a spurtious swapbuffer is being called.

[alex-w]

@joequant please check our AppImage

[IvoMajic]

Having the same issue on Arch Linux. Tried both the official Arch package and the AppImage.

[gzotti]

A workaround is described in the duplicate #2127 (comment)

[NigelCunningham]

Hi there. I've come across this issue too, and am wondering about the policy for getting an actual fix - both issues have been closed but joequant's comment above indicates it may be possible to find a proper fix within Stellarium. If I (or someone else) can manage to track down the cause (or even want to try), should we be opening a new issue for that discussion, or reopening this issue? Thanks!

By the way, I did find that disabling "Zodiacal Light brightness" and "Atmosphere visualization" in the Sky tab of the "Sky and Viewing options" dialog greatly reduces (but does not completely eliminate) the flashing.

[gzotti]

This issue here is open. Others which describe the same problem have been closed as duplicates. The issue only appears on some Linux systems. All of the reported systems have Intel GPUs. From these bits of information it appears very likely the problems do not lie within Stellarium's program sources but with Intel GPU drivers for Linux. You may want to report this issue to Intel or the Mesa project. A workaround has been reported for affected users of Stellarium.

[NigelCunningham]

Thanks for the reply gzotti - I was mistakenly thrown by the 'Closed' (related issue) just above; thanks.

I saw mention in the linked Reddit article of the possibility that the OpenGL queue is filling. Would you know if there's any way I could test out that theory? (I've worked on the kernel in the past so have some low level knowledge and would have no problem when it comes to changing kernel command line parameters or other config if there's some tunable related to the OpenGL queue length that I haven't found in my Googling so far).

[gzotti]

Sorry, I cannot help with driver-level OpenGL or kernel debugging on Linux.

[NigelCunningham]

Ok. Thanks anyway!

[lelajels]

I confirm I have this issue with Stellarium 0.21.3. on Manjaro Linux, kernels 5.15 and 5.10. Below is the data for my graphics devices:

Device-1: Intel HD Graphics 530 driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: NVIDIA GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M] driver: nouveau v: kernel
  Display: wayland server: X.org 1.21.1.2 driver:
    loaded: modesetting,nvidia

I was able to work around this issue either by running Stellarium on the Nvidia GPU or by downgrading Mesa from 21.3.2 to 21.2.5., if using Intel graphics.

FYI, there are a couple of issues already opened upstream at freedesktop.org for this. See below:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/5731
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/5782

[alex-w]

@El-Brujo-Manjaro did you tried patch: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/uploads/accd04634117b88139e5320482610013/mesa-21.3.3-fix-bug-5731.patch ?

[NigelCunningham]

Thanks for the additional info. I realise you're not asking me, @alex-w, but I'll seek to find the time to apply the patch today (I'm on Arch Linux) too.

[NigelCunningham]

I can confirm that the above patch fixes the flashing for me (just install the packages; no reboot or restart of X required). It makes Stellarium soooo much more usable!

[alex-w]

I can confirm that the above patch fixes the flashing for me (just install the packages; no reboot or restart of X required). It makes Stellarium soooo much more usable!

Well, this is definitely bug in MESA and we should close this issue.