[arch-general] X terminal redraw problem

[Jon Gjengset]

Hi fellow archers!

This is my first post to this mailing list, so please excuse my
behavior if I have picked the wrong list =)

For a couple of months now, I have been experiencing occasional
"flickering" in my terminal emulator (urxvt, but also happens with
xterm, roxterm and gnome-terminal).

There are several forum threads on the same issue:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=118648
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117202
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117423
The latter seems to be the biggest one...

The problem is that every now and then, the terminal seems to "forget"
to draw some of the text on the screen, leaving a mangled output
consisting of some stale text cells (as in the character that was
previously in that position is still visible) and some empty cells (the
previous character was a space, and the new character was not printed).

The problem seems to occur sporadically, but happens often enough to be
a real nuissance.
Highlighting any text in the terminal window causes the text to be
immediately corrected.
The problem also appears when using vim or terminal-based emacs (i.e.
curses interfaces).

Seems the problem is quite widespread, and affects both nVidia, AMD/ATI
and Intel graphics drivers.. A bug in X perhaps?

Could someone with a bit more know-how than me please have a look?

Any help is greatly appreciated,
Jon
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