Acer TravelMate B118-M-P98A - Screen blinks on and off when OSD appears and in VirtualBox

Greetings, all.

I recently purchased an Acer TravelMate B118-M-P98A (article number NX.VHPEG.005). I believe it came with Linpus Linux but I'm running openSUSE Leap 15.1 instead. The computer reports that it has a UHD Graphics 605 controller.

Unfortunately, I'm encountering a problem where the laptop screen rapidly blinks on and off for several seconds. This happens whenever the on-screen display appears as a result of using the Fn+Up and Fn+Dn keys to change the volume, and it also happens very often when I am running Windows 7 in VirtualBox. Needless to say, this problem can make it difficult to get work done.

I also have an Acer TravelMate B115 but it doesn't have the same problem.

Has anyone else been experiencing this screen-blinking problem? Is there any chance this is a hardware problem or a BIOS problem, or is it more likely to be a problem with the X.Org Intel driver or my desktop environment's compositor? (I'm running KDE Plasma.)

Accepted answers

Logological

In case anyone else stumbles across this thread, I just wanted to report that the problem turned out to be in the i915 modesetting driver in the Linux kernel. A fix was backported to my distribution in late 2019; probably anyone who installs a recent (from 2020 or later) distribution of GNU/Linux will not experience this problem.

All comments

JackE

Have you posted this issue on the suse community yet? If yes, what response have you gotten so far? https://connect.opensuse.org/

Jack E/NJ

Logological

JackE said:

Have you posted this issue on the suse community yet? If yes, what response have you gotten so far? https://connect.opensuse.org/

You've posted a link to a (largely defunct) social network, not a support forum.

Anyway, from looking at my kernel logs, the problem appears to recognized by (and maybe even caused by) the i915 DRM driver, so I've reported the issue on its bug tracker. Still, if anyone here has also experienced this screen blinking problem and knows a solution, please let me know.

JackE

Sorry. This is mostly a Windows ACER support forum though some use Ubuntu & Debian flavored stuff. I mostly dual boot Mint 19.2 nowadays and only occasionally refer to an old SuSE 7.x version as a VMWare guest along with WinXP & Win98SE. About all I use now that's SuSE-related is their office suite. Jack E/NJ

Logological

JackE said:

Have you posted this issue on the suse community yet? If yes, what response have you gotten so far? https://connect.opensuse.org/

You've posted a link to a (largely defunct) social network, not a support forum.

Anyway, from looking at my kernel logs, the problem appears to recognized by (and maybe even caused by) the i915 DRM driver, so I've reported the issue on its bug tracker. Still, if anyone here has also experienced this screen blinking problem and knows a solution, please let me know.

Logological

JackE said:

Have you posted this issue on the suse community yet? If yes, what response have you gotten so far? https://connect.opensuse.org/

You've posted a link to a (largely defunct) social network, not a support forum.

Anyway, from looking at my kernel logs, the problem appears to recognized by (and maybe even caused by) the i915 DRM driver, so I've reported the issue on its bug tracker. Still, if anyone here has also experienced this screen blinking problem and knows a solution, please let me know.

JackE

Might as well post here to https://community.acer.com/en/categories/linux Jack E/NJ

Logological

In case anyone else stumbles across this thread, I just wanted to report that the problem turned out to be in the i915 modesetting driver in the Linux kernel. A fix was backported to my distribution in late 2019; probably anyone who installs a recent (from 2020 or later) distribution of GNU/Linux will not experience this problem.