heisenpointer (Fedora 17 flickering mouse pointer)

Ian Malone ibmalone at gmail.com
Mon Jun 25 20:41:32 UTC 2012


On 25 June 2012 16:05, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 21 Jun 2012 20:45:15 +0100
>> Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi, has anyone else seen this? Since installing F17 (probably the
>>> first clean fedora install I've done since single digits), I get a
>>> flickering mouse pointer when the system is busy. This might be
>>> related to the fact the mouse pointer hides instantly (no pause) when
>>> stopped over certain window areas (list items seem most common).
>>> Asking partly because I'm not sure what component to report this as a
>>> bug in.
>>
>>
>> One cause of that can be mishandling of memory bandwidth and FIFO
>> settings in the graphics card. My first guess therefore would be to file
>> it against whichever X server you are using and include the X trace, an
>> dmesg including a boot with drm.debug=7, an lspci and an lspci -vvxxx (as
>> root)
>>
> This may actually be in the WM, or cause by it. When I was looking for a new
> WM for users, I did note this behavior on some and not others. Since I was
> running on the same kernel and video driver, it seems to me that either the
> WM is actually doing this in areas where it doesn't show the pointer, or
> that it is loading an X driver with is causing this. Since I did see this
> first in a VM, then on a live fc16 install, using totally different video
> hardware, it's unlikely to be just poorly supported hardware.
>
> The OP might try using VNC for access, to see if that provides any useful
> info. I do believe the WM is making the cursor vanish when not moving.
>

I thought the WM too, but it's different between different kernel
versions, which suggests Alan is spot on. However I've also got a
kernel bug ongoing at the minute, so probably sensible to wait until
that's resolved (the kernels with the problem are being booted
acpi=off, which seems unrelated, but you never know).

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk


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