Terminal full black

[vikpascual]

Type: Bug

I dont know how to reproduce this bug. I just restart VSCode after last update. This happens with powershell, git bash and python debug terminal. I disabled GPU acceleration but nothing changed.

VS Code version: Code 1.80.0 (660393d, 2023-07-04T15:06:02.407Z)
OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.19045
Modes:

System Info

Item	Value
CPUs	11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11400H @ 2.70GHz (12 x 2688)
GPU Status	2d_canvas: enabled canvas_oop_rasterization: disabled_off direct_rendering_display_compositor: disabled_off_ok gpu_compositing: enabled multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on opengl: enabled_on rasterization: enabled raw_draw: disabled_off_ok video_decode: enabled video_encode: enabled vulkan: disabled_off webgl: enabled webgl2: enabled webgpu: enabled
Load (avg)	undefined
Memory (System)	15.75GB (8.24GB free)
Process Argv	--crash-reporter-id e61d592b-9712-4e12-b33c-5612294180e7
Screen Reader	no
VM	0%

Extensions (16)

Extension	Author (truncated)	Version
node-js-snippet	abd	1.1.3
javascript-ejs-support	Dig	1.3.3
jquerysnippets	don	0.0.1
code-runner	for	0.12.0
prettify-json	moh	0.0.3
isort	ms-	2022.8.0
python	ms-	2023.10.1
vscode-pylance	ms-	2023.7.10
jupyter	ms-	2023.6.1001861915
jupyter-keymap	ms-	1.1.2
jupyter-renderers	ms-	1.0.17
vscode-jupyter-cell-tags	ms-	0.1.8
vscode-jupyter-slideshow	ms-	0.1.5
cpptools	ms-	1.16.3
bootstrap4-vscode	the	6.1.0
JavaScriptSnippets	xab	1.8.0

(1 theme extensions excluded)

A/B Experiments

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azure-dev_surveyone:30548225
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pythonfmttext:30731395
pythoncmv:30756943
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pythongtdpath:30769146
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pythonnosmt12:30779714
pythonidxpt:30784022
pythonnocebcf:30776496
cmakesidepanelv2:30779593

[Kidsunbo]

I have met this bug as well after upgrading to 1.80.0.
The way I reproduce this is to

1. start a docker container of ubuntu
2. connect to the container with dev-container
3. start a new C++ project with CMake extension
4. just compile and run.
5. closing all the terminal
6. start a new terminal

From now on, the terminal is full black. But I could still start the terminal with '+' icon. It can be fixed by restart vscode. I hope this imformation could be helpful.

[vikpascual]

The first thing I did was to close all terminals and create new ones with the '+' symbol. The new terminals were experiencing the same issue. Then, I restarted VSCode and created new terminals again, but they still had the same problem.

[tjx666]

After updated latest, I also occur this issue sometime.

Version: 1.80.0
Commit: 660393deaaa6d1996740ff4880f1bad43768c814
Date: 2023-07-04T13:40:17.963Z
Electron: 22.3.14
ElectronBuildId: 21893604
Chromium: 108.0.5359.215
Node.js: 16.17.1
V8: 10.8.168.25-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 22.5.0

[wulling1024]

I'm also having this issue, can it be fixed recently @meganrogge

[vikpascual]

After uninstalling and installing VSCode the problem persists. Terminal works but I can see nothing.

[jerch]

Plz also check if the issue goes away after disabling terminal image support:

"terminal.integrated.enableImages": false

@Tyriar I remember a similar issue happened when tabby integrated image support for the first time, but I had no chance to verify, as the reporter never answered in the issue thread. Could that be some electron/chrome gpu driver issue not being able to do transparent composition, and thus falling back to just a black canvas? Note that I never experienced that myself, so I am not even sure, if it is related to the image addon at all.

[JoonChicken]

@jerch That fixed the problem for me.

[vikpascual]

That fixed the problem for me too. Can I close this thread?

[jerch]

Thx for the confirmations. I cannot really help to further debug this with electron/vscode, as I dont know how things like --disable-gpu or chrome://gpu play into this for electron. I also cannot repro it with any device I have access to.

It pretty much smells like a driver issue with degraded transparent canvas composition, as the image canvas is meant to be a transparent layer above the terminal text layer drawing image tiles on top. This normally works for all text layer renderer types (DOM, canvas or webgl2).

Can I close this thread?

Imho it is better to keep it open for now, as the circumstances, when the canvas gets wrongly painted black instead of transparent, might need further investigation.

[vikpascual]

Anyway I don't know if it has something to do with it, but, I always have GPU acceleration disabled because this other problem happens. I don't know if it will help you. Can't read nothing in VSCode if GPU acceleration is on.

[starball5]

Related question and answer on Stack Overflow.

And a duplicate question. And another duplicate. And another one. And another one 🙃.

Help with closing the duplicates would be appreciated if you have the privilege level on Stack Overflow to do so (flag or close-vote) so that the answers can all be found in one place instead of scattered about.

[jerch]

@starball5 Regarding your SO answer - imho this is not a bug in vscode, but more a gpu / driver / chromium bug for some rare constellations, for which vscode has no workaround yet. I think the majority of users dont face it at all.

Ofc the question remains - how to fix this for the last <<10% of users? Maybe @Tyriar has more insights, when this actually happens and how to avoid it.
To me it seems very likely, that if the webgl or the canvas renderer dont work properly on a machine, the image overlay never gonna work sufficiently, as it def. needs the transparent overlaying (there is no other way around with the DOM renderer underneath, on the other hand for webgl/canvas the output could theoretically be merged into just one canvas).

Apparently, the problem can be fixed for one time by force-quitting and restarting VS Code, but the problem comes back every time the terminal is killed.

This seems to be a second issue, or triggered by other means. @Tyriar is there a way to determine a post resume state from electron? Maybe an explicit canvas refresh after resume already fixes this? Is there some other state holding going on between terminal kills?

[Tyriar]

Bit late to join here but I'm thinking we should only allow images when the canvas or webgl renderers are being used, in other words, depending on terminal.integrated.gpuAcceleration.

@jerch do we need { alpha: true } on any of these getContext calls?

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajerch%2Fxterm-addon-image%20getcontext&type=code

The regular renderers are all opaque in VS Code so this canvas is a little special compared to them.

[jerch]

Well this one here is def. needed, otherwise the transparent overlaying does not work: https://github.com/jerch/xterm-addon-image/blob/5f5bae8c5fc4fe5269e3025a4f96ace38fc300e1/src/ImageRenderer.ts#L311

All others are set to alpha: false, which should be the default setting anyway.

I am not sure, if the desynchronized: true creates further driver issues here, if so we can remove it (runs abit slower in chromium without, but not much).

[Tyriar]

I doubt desynchronized would cause problems, let's go with checking if the DOM renderer is being used and disable it in that case

[jerch]

@Tyriar Is this issue worth to be further investigated or even reported to chromium devs at some point? Not being able to use transparent canvas layering on some machines these days looks to me like a rather bold issue for the browser engine with the biggest marketshare.

Ofc this only makes sense if you can track down the issue further, e.g. which platform + gpu settings are affected. I would suspect that their is a common pattern to be found in chrome://gpu for those machines, sadly chrome's gpu/canvas stack is quite convoluted with all sorts of software shims to fix this or that, so it might be hard to spot this pattern. Well idk if it is worth the extra rounds, maybe only if a bigger percentage of ppl are affected by it.

[Tyriar]

@jerch if we could get a minimal repro we could, I wouldn't want to potentially waste their time without one though. We've always had a class of users where GPU acceleration just doesn't work, some need to move on to terminal's dom renderer, and some need to launch Electron with --disable-gpu.

[tjx666]

@Tyriar

I can still occur this issue in latest recovery1:

Version: 1.80.1
Commit: 74f6148eb9ea00507ec113ec51c489d6ffb4b771
Date: 2023-07-12T17:20:58.115Z
Electron: 22.3.14
ElectronBuildId: 21893604
Chromium: 108.0.5359.215
Node.js: 16.17.1
V8: 10.8.168.25-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 22.5.0

2023-07-15.04.04.27.mov

[Kidsunbo]

@Tyriar

I can still occur this issue in latest recovery1:

Version: 1.80.1
Commit: 74f6148eb9ea00507ec113ec51c489d6ffb4b771
Date: 2023-07-12T17:20:58.115Z
Electron: 22.3.14
ElectronBuildId: 21893604
Chromium: 108.0.5359.215
Node.js: 16.17.1
V8: 10.8.168.25-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 22.5.0

2023-07-15.04.04.27.mov

this might be another bug. #187772

[42n8dzydoo]

I figured my dark terminal was caused by my old Nvidia driver. Yesterday, they released a new update and the terminal was perfectly okay after.

Thanks y'all