How to Change Graphics Settings (Panel Self Refresh)

English Multimedia
1

I recently updated Tumbleweed with the latest updates on my laptop (yoga 2 pro) and have been suffering from bad screen flickering. I noticed a similar problem on windows 10, and found that in windows, it is likely caused by a new driver enabling “Panel Self Refresh” (PSR) (see: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Yoga-2-Pro-Screen-Flickering-and-Screen-Blanking/td-p/1331137/page/10). My symptoms are the same as what is being described for PSR problems on windows (if I switch TTY’s or while moving the mouse, the flickering stops). On windows, the solutions seems to be to simply disable PSR. I have not been in windows recently to confirm whether that is what is causing the flickering in windows, but it seems very likely.

I have two questions:

  1. Where can I disable PSR in the new drivers?
  2. If it is not possible / known how to disable PSR in the new drivers and I want to downgrade the graphics driver to go back to the version that did not have PSR, is this the package to do so called xf86-video-intel ?

System info:

/sbin/lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A2

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0a16] (rev 09)
        Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:3978]
        Kernel driver in use: i915
2

Well, for posterity:
0) Confirm psr is turned on with:

systool -m i915 -av | grep psr

the following output indicates psr is on and may be the cause of the flickering: enable_psr = “1”

To turn off psr:

  1. Create a new file ‘/etc/modprobe.d/50-i915.conf’
  2. Write the following in the file:
options i915 enable_psr=0
  1. Run
mkinitrd
  1. Reboot and enjoy your laptop without flickering