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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

(Note: I'm not blaming anyone!)

Impressive: Firefox hold fine and rendered it, but after I opened it the second time, all the text in my system (that includes the browser, but also the terminals, Awesome, etc) was FUBAR - even after restarting the X server!

I have no idea what kind of bug leads to only the text being corrupted (so, it doesn't seem a bug in the graphic drivers, since AFAIK they're agnostic to that) but survives restarting the display manager.

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I've had similar experiences with graphical corruption in X, and Firefox was almost always involved. Same radeon driver as you. And it seems to be distro-agnostic: I've seen it with Arch, Gentoo and Mint. All I know is that it's a recent thing: if I run an older version of my Gentoo build, it doesn't happen. But otherwise I see the same results.

I have no idea what to point to, because it's really weird. Scrambles /everything/ that goes through video. (And until now, I figured it was a quirk of my bizarre hardware. Guess not.)

its a bug with cairo and the radeon driver:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47266

on debian you can pin libcairo to fix the issue. /etc/apt/preferences:

  Package: libcairo2
  Pin:version 1.10.2-7
  Pin-Priority: 1001

  Package: libcairo-gobject2
  Pin:version 1.10.2-7
  Pin-Priority: 1001

That explains it perfectly. My older Gentoo build has an even older version of libcairo installed. Thanks.

Fantastic. I've been trying to pinpoint the cause of it since aeons. It's absolutely dreadful in awesome wm and at some point I laid the blame on (cairo-)XCB, or some Xft bug, but it cropped back too, only less often, under gnome/xfce.

I tried zooming in and out in Chrome on Windows 7, and it crashed my NVIDIA kernel mode driver.

Hm. Interesting. Using binary graphics drivers (nvidia et al)? Maybe something corrupted memory. Did it survive even a restart?

I'm using the OSS radeon drivers and no, fortunately it was fine after a reboot :)

Corrupted memory was my first thought, but affecting only text is odd - I mean, the drivers aren't even supposed to know those particular pixels are text, right?

In Firefox 12, if I click on the View menu and leave the menu open for a while, it turns into some sort of odd colour gradient.

Interesting bug... can anyone else reproduce this?

Not necessarily, no, I think graphic cards are aware that certain things are text. For example, I have a thinkpad t400 with two graphic cards(ATI and intel), on the ATI the text in consoles is not anti-aliased, but on the intel one it is. So I'm pretty sure that the graphic card(or at least the drivers) are aware of what is text and what is not to some extent

In Arch / Chromium / Intel card, and after starting Chromium disabling the webgl graphic cards blacklist, it just shuts my monitor down and I have to reboot.

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