Graphical artifacts in KDE 5 on Intel GMA4500MHD

Question

A fresh installation of Arch Linux is showing weird graphical artifacts. This screenshot, taken with KSnapshot, matches what you would see on the screen:

The artifacts show up in almost every window, including Konsole, and excluding Chrome, start menu, Alt+F2 launcher, and standard popups in the system tray: the list of wifi networks, calendar, notifications, klipper, etc. KMix is broken too. Tinkering with KDE renderer settings doesn't help, as you may see in the screenshot. The artifacts are the same on OpenGL 2.0/3.1 and XRender.

Kernel version:

$ uname -r
4.0.7-2-ARCH

The folowing drivers are installed:

• xf86-video-intel 1:2.99.917+364+gb24e758-1
• libva-intel-driver 1.6.0-1

A log of a KWin restart someone on #kde asked me to do: https://bpaste.net/show/3cb442203867

Some more information:

• Xorg.0.log: http://paste.pound-python.org/show/R3ehiRhOxIXjnhFUJL0U/
• glxinfo: http://paste.pound-python.org/show/JhZIqZ2XRdfKwfbqFErj/

However, Kubuntu 15.04 (with KDE 5 as well) does not have any artifacts. So is this a bug of KDE, Qt, or video drivers, and is it possible to fix it?

Answer 1

I was experiencing this issue when I had VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl environment variable in effect.

Try setting the environment variable QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM to one of native, raster, or opengl before executing any Qt app, like so:

export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=native
konsole

If you find one of the values working for you, you can set it permanently in yout .profile or similar.

Or clear the VDPAU_DRIVER variable, if set.