Ubuntu – Mangled and flickering graphics on Yoga 910 with 1920×1080 resolution

graphicshd-videointel graphics

I've just installed Ubuntu 16.10 on a Lenovo Yoga 910 and have found that when I set the resolution to its native 1920×1080, the display immediately starts flickering and becoming mangled/visually corrupted. Moving the mouse around appears to sometimes make it less horrible, but it's essentially unusable. The same thing happens at the login screen and also when I switch to a different tty.

I'm running the latest Intel i915, updated with the Intel Graphics Update Tool for Linux, and I've tried running with the AccelMethod as both SNA and UXA.

IS there anything I can do to isolate the cause of the problem?

The output of lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 VGA gives me this:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:5916] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:3801]
Kernel driver in use: i915

Best Answer

As per this bug, the problem seems to be associated with a power saving feature of the GPU. Disabling this feature through the kernel parameter i915.enable_rc6=0 completely fixed the problem for me.

In my travels, I also found another kernel parameter people have also used to fix screen flickering issues (i915.enable_psr=0), however I didn't need this one.

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