Objects flickering on and off

Hi all,

I'm having a really weird problem with SL that has me tearing my hair out and was wondering if anyone had come across it or some pointers for me to try...

When moving about objects flicker on and off. It's not every object, just sections of the world will blink out and then back in again. If you face in a particular direction the things that have vanished will stay vanished until you move slightly and they will blink back in again.

Now, here's the strange bit. I've only started getting this recently. v1.18.1.2 was working perfectly, now it's not so I started looking for other changes.

I'm running Debian, ATI X700, with the fglrx drivers. First thing I tried was taking the fglrx driver out of the equation by reverting to the Radeon driver. Problem was still there although a lot slower.

Next thing I tried was a new install of SL. Re-downloaded 1.18.1.2, created myself a test account on my PC, installed SL in it's homedir and logged in as the test account. Problem is still there.

I thought maybe something had changed on my X server so I backed out all the updates to X and any associated libraries to prior to the release date of 1.18.1.2, still had the problem.

I've mostly ruled out a hardware problem as I don't see this under Windows. I tried the 1.18.3.2 version of SL, still the same.

So, I'm at a loss as to what could be causing it. Does anyone have any suggestions? It's particularly infuriating since up until now SL has been working pretty much flawlessly under Linux and now it's not.

I have very similar problem too. I use Debian/sid, Mobility Radeon X300, and fglrx-8.41.7-1 now.

When I faced the particular direction(just South, North, East, West), a lots of objects vanish from my sight.

Hinkley, we are not alone

Additionally, there seems another problem in my environment.

When I surround A PRIM by mouse in order to get it selected, hundreds of prims are selected against my will.

How about you, Hinkley?

Now that's very interesting....

Yes, I do get that symptom. I'd not actually noticed it until you mentioned it because I'd not tried building in SL after the other symptom started.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one experiencing this, the selection thing is an interesting data point, kind of suggests something to do with working out where prims are, in one case clipping things that are in view, in the second, selecting things that are not in the selection area.

Same here running Debian Sid.

The problems for me seem to have started after updating some mesa stuff.

Johnnie, I owe you a beer!

This is exactly what the problem is.

The solution I have is to roll back the mesa packages to 6.5.2-6. If you have a hunt around in /var/cache/apt/archives you may still have the old packages there.

The one's you'll need to re-install are:
libgl1-mesa-dri_6.5.2-6_i386.deb
libgl1-mesa-glx_6.5.2-6_i386.deb
libglu1-mesa_6.5.2-6_i386.deb
mesa-utils_6.5.2-6_i386.deb

Thanks for everyone's help, hope this helps some others too.

I'll take that beer!

In sid I downgraded them to 7.0.1-1

You can find the packages here if you ran an autoclean after installing the mesa stuff like I did. http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mesa/

Cool, just installed the 7.0.1-1 packages and re-tested, all OK. Looks like it is something introduced in the 7.0.1-2 packages that caused the breakage.

Nice guys. Thanks for this. Have the same thing (with nVidia drivers) and it's been driving me nuts.

Just FYI I've been seeing this on the latest Windows client as well. At certain angles peoples attachments vanish. Prim hair, for example, will just flicker on and off. Never seen anything quite like this, and it's not an alpha/invisiprim thing either.

The problem disappear after downglading mesa stuff to 7.0.1-1.

Johnnie, Hinkley, thank you guys.

If you can't find the 7.0.1-1 packages there anymore, a reliable source is the snapshot server:

http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2007/08/10/debian/pool/main/m/mesa/

Yay! Downgrading did just the trick for me. As is my wont I made a script to solve the problem; it does partial downloads too. If anyone wants to use it (should be totally obsolete after the next unbroken version of Mesa), feel free. Run it as root and it'll drop perms for the downloading.

http://synx.us.to/code/downgradeMesa.py

Thanks for the fix..

Has anyone reported this problem to the mesa team or the debian packagers? Do we know it is a mesa bug or a debian bug and not a problem with SL?

Edit:

This is what the debian mesa changelog says:

+mesa (7.0.1-2) unstable; urgency=low
+
+ * Update to latest git (from mesa_7_0_branch)
+ + adds support for some new intel chipsets (i915 and i915_tex dri drivers)
+ (closes: #437333)
+ + broken inline asm in dri drivers fixed (closes: #423739)

Not sure how either of these could have led to the current problems....

Agreed. This is annoying but it's hard to report because I think everyone is going to "pass the buck"...

Downgrading those packages to the -1 versions didn't fix it for me

Fixed it. If you're on x86_64 you need to downgrade ia32-libs from 2.2 to 2.1 and all will be well.