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jchau
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 3:13 am    Post subject: [solved] font glitches in X applications Reply with quote

Has anyone else noticed glitches in font rendering recently?

I've been noticing in Mozilla Firefox and in LibreOffice that characters would occasionally be misrendered, making the character appear to have been scrambled. Triggering the character to be re-rendered (e.g., by selecting the text and unselecting it) seems to fix the rendering though.

It has been infrequent, and although I have noticed it many times in the past (few?) weeks, I have only been able to capture the glitch as a screenshot once before the glitch was repaired (unfortunately, that time, the glitch appeared in a LibreOffice document with some confidential information, so I didn't save the screenshot).

This seems to be a new problem as I haven't noticed it before recently (at most a few weeks ago).

Any ideas on how to start to debug this issue? I don't understand the problem well enough to file a meaningful bug report yet.

Thanks!


Last edited by jchau on Mon Mar 31, 2014 4:00 pm; edited 1 time in total
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jchau
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 7:35 pm    Post subject: Also appears in Emacs Reply with quote

I've started noticing these font glitches in emacs too. Here's a cropped screenshot of the font rendering glitch: http://imgur.com/1djFdBA. Notice how the 'i' in "modifying" is rendered.
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jchau
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 3:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Found what appears to be the same problem in Arch Linux: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=171128
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jchau
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 3:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

And Manjaro Linux: http://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=7269.0
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PaulBredbury
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 6:03 am    Post subject: Re: font glitches in X applications Reply with quote

jchau wrote:
Mozilla Firefox

Ver 24 had a bit of disappearing text for me, but the ver 25 betas are OK.

Lots of packages involved: icu pixman freetype fontconfig cairo pango
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jchau
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 7:44 am    Post subject: Re: font glitches in X applications Reply with quote

PaulBredbury wrote:
jchau wrote:
Mozilla Firefox

Ver 24 had a bit of disappearing text for me, but the ver 25 betas are OK.

Lots of packages involved: icu pixman freetype fontconfig cairo pango


I'm on Firefox 17.0.9. The font rendering issue appears to affect X in general, so I think we may have experienced different problems.

I tried rebuilding world and that took a few days, but the problem still persists.

The Arch Linux forum thread on what appears to be the same bug, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=171128, identifies xf86-video-intel as the culprit. On October 2nd, 2013, I upgraded from x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.20.13 to x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.21.15. I'm going to try downgrading back to 2.20.13 and see if that fixes the font glitch.
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VoidMage
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 9:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Any chance it's x11-libs/cairo[xlib-xcb] ?
If so, see if unsetting it helps.
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Clad in Sky
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 9:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've experienced it in FF (17.0.0.9, I guess. 17 something anyway), too, but only on Intel graphics.
It's somewhat lessened when I switch of smooth scrolling.
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jchau
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 6:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

VoidMage wrote:
Any chance it's x11-libs/cairo[xlib-xcb] ?
If so, see if unsetting it helps.


My cairo wasn't built with xlib-xcb. Thanks for the suggestion though.

emerge --info cairo:
Code:
Portage 2.2.1 (hardened/linux/amd64/selinux, gcc-4.7.3, glibc-2.15-r3, 3.10.1-hardened-r1-2013Sep08 x86_64)
=================================================================
                        System Settings
=================================================================
System uname: Linux-3.10.1-hardened-r1-2013Sep08-x86_64-Intel-R-_Core-TM-2_Duo_CPU_U9400_@_1.40GHz-with-gentoo-2.2
KiB Mem:     8059056 total,   5938896 free
KiB Swap:    8388604 total,   8388604 free
Timestamp of tree: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 00:45:01 +0000
ld GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.23.1
app-shells/bash:          4.2_p45
dev-java/java-config:     2.1.12-r1
dev-lang/python:          2.7.5-r3, 3.2.5-r3
dev-util/cmake:           2.8.10.2-r2
dev-util/pkgconfig:       0.28
sys-apps/baselayout:      2.2
sys-apps/openrc:          0.11.8
sys-apps/sandbox:         2.6-r1
sys-devel/autoconf:       2.13, 2.69
sys-devel/automake:       1.10.3, 1.11.6, 1.13.4
sys-devel/binutils:       2.23.1
sys-devel/gcc:            4.7.3-r1
sys-devel/gcc-config:     1.7.3
sys-devel/libtool:        2.4.2
sys-devel/make:           3.82-r4
sys-kernel/linux-headers: 3.9 (virtual/os-headers)
sys-libs/glibc:           2.15-r3
Repositories: gentoo x-portage
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64"
ACCEPT_LICENSE="* -@EULA @BINARY-REDISTRIBUTABLE AdobeFlash-11.x Google-TOS PUEL"
CBUILD="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=core2 -O2 -pipe -msse4.1"
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/share/gnupg/qualified.txt"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/ca-certificates.conf /etc/env.d /etc/fonts/fonts.conf /etc/gconf /etc/gentoo-release /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/sandbox.d /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/language.dat.d /etc/texmf/language.def.d /etc/texmf/updmap.d /etc/texmf/web2c"
CXXFLAGS="-march=core2 -O2 -pipe -msse4.1"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FCFLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
FEATURES="assume-digests binpkg-logs config-protect-if-modified distlocks ebuild-locks fixlafiles merge-sync news parallel-fetch preserve-libs protect-owned sandbox selinux sesandbox sfperms strict unknown-features-warn unmerge-logs unmerge-orphans userfetch userpriv usersandbox usersync webrsync-gpg xattr"
FFLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.netnitco.net      http://gentoo.mirrors.tds.net/gentoo    http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/gentoo-distfiles/     http://distfiles.gentoo.org     http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo"
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--as-needed"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT="/"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --omit-dir-times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --stats --human-readable --timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC=""
USE="X aac alsa amd64 berkdb bluetooth bzip2 cairo caps cjk cli consolekit cracklib crypt cups cxx dbus dri dvd exif ffmpeg flac gdbm gnutls gstreamer hal hardened iconv ipv6 jpeg justify laptop lcms mmx modules mp3 mudflap multilib ncurses nls nptl ogg open_perms opengl openmp pam pax_kernel pcre png ppds readline sdl selinux session spell sse sse2 ssl ssse3 system-sqlite tcpd theora threads truetype unicode urandom v4l vaapi vorbis xinerama xv xvmc zlib" ABI_X86="64" ALSA_CARDS="hda-intel usb-audio" APACHE2_MODULES="authn_core authz_core socache_shmcb unixd actions alias auth_basic authn_alias authn_anon authn_dbm authn_default authn_file authz_dbm authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_owner authz_user autoindex cache cgi cgid dav dav_fs dav_lock deflate dir disk_cache env expires ext_filter file_cache filter headers include info log_config logio mem_cache mime mime_magic negotiation rewrite setenvif speling status unique_id userdir usertrack vhost_alias" CALLIGRA_FEATURES="kexi words flow plan sheets stage tables krita karbon braindump author" CAMERAS="ptp2" COLLECTD_PLUGINS="df interface irq load memory rrdtool swap syslog" ELIBC="glibc" GPSD_PROTOCOLS="ashtech aivdm earthmate evermore fv18 garmin garmintxt gpsclock itrax mtk3301 nmea ntrip navcom oceanserver oldstyle oncore rtcm104v2 rtcm104v3 sirf superstar2 timing tsip tripmate tnt ubx" INPUT_DEVICES="evdev synaptics" KERNEL="linux" LIBREOFFICE_EXTENSIONS="presenter-console presenter-minimizer" LINGUAS="en_US en" OFFICE_IMPLEMENTATION="libreoffice" PHP_TARGETS="php5-5" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python2_7" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_2" RUBY_TARGETS="ruby20 ruby19" USERLAND="GNU" VIDEO_CARDS="intel i965" XTABLES_ADDONS="quota2 psd pknock lscan length2 ipv4options ipset ipp2p iface geoip fuzzy condition tee tarpit sysrq steal rawnat logmark ipmark dhcpmac delude chaos account"
Unset:  CPPFLAGS, CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, MAKEOPTS, PORTAGE_BUNZIP2_COMMAND, PORTAGE_COMPRESS, PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS, USE_PYTHON

=================================================================
                        Package Settings
=================================================================

x11-libs/cairo-1.12.14-r4 was built with the following:
USE="X glib opengl svg (-aqua) -debug -directfb -doc (-drm) (-gallium) (-gles2) -legacy-drivers -openvg (-qt4) -static-libs -valgrind -xcb -xlib-xcb"
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jchau
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 24, 2013 7:03 pm    Post subject: Re: font glitches in X applications Reply with quote

jchau wrote:

The Arch Linux forum thread on what appears to be the same bug, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=171128, identifies xf86-video-intel as the culprit. On October 2nd, 2013, I upgraded from x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.20.13 to x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.21.15. I'm going to try downgrading back to 2.20.13 and see if that fixes the font glitch.


After a few days with the older x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.20.13, I can confirm that the update for xf86-video-intel appears to be the cause of the problem. I have not noticed any font glitches since downgrading back to xf86-video-intel-2.20.13.
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jchau
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 29, 2014 3:33 pm    Post subject: xorg-server-1.15.0 upgrade and bug 496682 forces upgrade Reply with quote

An ABI change in xorg-server and bug 496682 is forcing me to upgrade back to xf86-video-intel-2.21.15 since xf86-video-intel-2.20.13 is no longer compatible.

I'll keep an eye out to see if this font glitch still occurs, but this workaround is no longer practical (unless we intend to never upgrade X again).
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jchau
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 30, 2014 6:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I do still see the font corruption with xf86-video-intel-2.21.15, with sna enabled. Switching from sna to uxa appears to avoid the font corruption problem.

I have reported this bug upstream: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76804.
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jchau
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 4:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A final follow-up:

After about a day of testing x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.99.911, the font corruption problem appears to have been solved. For anyone else experiencing this problem, I recommend upgrading to this later version (with the ~amd64 keyword).

Thanks!
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