Flickering - any chance to kill it? (future/outlook)

[Regenwald]

hi everybody,

i think anybody knows "flickering" which occurs during i move/resize/minimize windows. (here you get an impression from what i mean: http://vektor.ca/eclipse/firefox-stopped.png)

so anybody hates it (or me at least). it's totally ugly. as far as i know, the only way to kill/eliminate it, is to use an accelerated desktop and activate "wobbling windows"-plugin in compiz-fusion and minimize the "wobbling"-effect.

but i wonder if there are other "possiblities" to get rid of it. it doesn't seem to be a driver issue, it is an architectural problem i think. but how to kill it? is there a possibility? is anybody working on that problem?
i think about this article (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NjM1Nw) from fosdem 08, keith listed it (called it tearing, i think), but i don't the current status.
i would be glad if someone could answer my questions

[Regenwald]

has noone an idea?

[Kano]

Disable compiz, try

metacity --replace &

[Ex-Cyber]

What that screenshot shows is not really flickering. I don't know of a proper name for it, but it's sometimes called the "deck of cards" effect. It's caused by the underlying application taking too long to redraw its window. The server draws the window being dragged/resized on top of the underlying window, which "damages" the window. It is then the underlying window's job to redraw itself when the old position is no longer occupied. Hence if you drag a window across Firefox while it's busy chewing on some JavaScript, all of the copies of the dragged window stay there until Firefox gets back to its GUI loop again.

I'm not deeply familiar with the compositing methods employed on current accelerated desktops, but they can probably get rid of this by effectively making every window its own private buffer and moving the job of dealing with damage into the compositing code. Something like this is probably what happens when you enable that compiz-fusion plugin.

Tearing is also a different phenomenon; that's related to synchronization (or lack thereof) between framebuffer updates and screen updates, and typically is not under the application's control. It shows up as a break in the graphics along a horizontal line when moving a window or scrolling/panning its contents.