Flickering screen with Fedora 32 on ThinkPad X1 Extreme

Ask Fedora
1

With a fresh installation of Fedora 32 on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme, my screen flickers occasionally. The flickering to and from a black screen happens every couple of minutes, and takes a fraction of a second.

On Windows and Ubuntu 20.04, this does not happen, and so this appears to be a Fedora-specific issue.

The flickering happens regardless of whether the nouveau or proprietary NVIDIA drivers are used, and also regardless of whether Xorg or Wayland is used.

Solutions and/or ideas for things to try would be very welcome.

1 Like
2

@jbaayen, Welcome to Ask.Fedora!

This could be the same issue as described here…

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-32-hangs-while-opening-folder-on-the-app-grid/72031

… and reported here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2665

Can you confirm?

3

That issue might be related, but unlike the issue:

  • My system does not hang after flickering occurs.
  • The flicker occurs regardless of what I do. It also occurs when browsing the web or using the terminal, for instance.
4

I see English Community-Lenovo Community
and they don’t speak of any OS… so it might be a general problem.

5

I saw that post too, but I don’t observe any flickering with Windows 10 or Ubuntu 20.04 …

I have been using Windows on this machine most of the day today, and I haven’t observed a single flicker. Whereas on Fedora, it happens every couple of minutes.

6

I have a ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 1) and installed Fedora 32 yesterday. I had some flickering issues with the nouveau driver, but once I installed the NVIDIA drivers I had no issues and in fact I am very impressed Fedora 32. Its been a very long time since I installed a Fedora distro on hardware.

Some notes:

  1. ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 1) - not sure which Gen you have
  2. In the firmware I selected discreet (NVIDIA only) graphics
  3. I installed the rpmfusion repo’s directly from the site https://rpmfusion.org/
  4. I did not enable the NVIDIA driver repos from GNOME Software
  5. I installed NVIDIA as per the rpmfusion HOWTO instructions Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion
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Many thanks for sharing this.

My recipe had been the same, apart from step two, changing the display setting in the BIOS.
Searching around reveals this to be a risky operation on older BIOS versions:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Thinkpad-X1-Extreme-Black-Screen-Help/td-p/4286292?page=1
But, after verifying that my BIOS version did support changing this setting, I went ahead and changed the setting to “discrete”.

No flickering since! So I can confirm that this resolves the issue. :grin:

For the record: This is a 2nd generation X1 Extreme.

3 Likes
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Glad I was able to help. The reason I tried Fedora in the first place was because of the news that Lenovo will be shipping ThinkPads with Fedora installed. To my surprise it works great!

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Ok… At first when you mention the problem existed both with Nvidia drivers and Nouveau I convinced myself not to feel guilty. But now that you suggest that switching to Nvidia fix it, I feel guilty! Because a bit more than one year I isolated a flickering problem on an old Nvidia GPU (I don’t remember the model)… and my fix was applied by Nouveau maintainers… around december, I learned that it caused flickering problem on less obscure models… It was proposed to apply my patch only for the detected problematic model… but I frankly just don’t know how to test for the hardware… so I sat on the bug… The bug report is 108514 – heavy screen flickering with Mobility Radeon X1600 and kernel version 3.15rc2 onward My patch have been ported to:
Linux 4.14.125, Linux 4.19.50, Linux 5.1.9 so if you test on a version just a bit older on Nouveau… well you could make me feeling even more guilty. :wink: The most recent version I can find that is prior to my patch, is 5.1.8 for Fedora 30: kernel-5.1.8-300.fc30 | Build Info | koji … which make it a bit hard to test. Maybe it is possible to test in a more recent version… I am very unsure.

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Oh, interesting! Looking at your patch though, does it not apply to Radeon cards only?

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Well… yes you are right… it would certainly not apply to a GeForce® GTX 1650 Max-Q 4 Go.