Odd Graphical Glitches with AMD HD 6250

[Mirage256]

Aloha! I've been able to install Haiku on an old Laptop of mine, a Toshiba NB550D. However, there are a bunch of very odd graphical glitches that render the interface almost unusable. There's a snow effect across the entire screen, like an old CRT that isn't tuned to a channel, and all of the colors are very saturated and have an odd sort of color fringing around them. I will attach a screenshot to this bug to show what I mean.

The Toshiba NB550D uses an AMD Radeon HD 6250 as its graphics card.The graphics card appears to be recognized by Haiku; the proper screen resolution is detected in the screen settings program, and when I look in the source code in haiku/src/add-ons/kernel/drivers/graphics/radeon_hd/driver.cpp, I can see that the Radeon HD 6250 appears to be supported, as there is a dedicated entry for it in the driver. The system has not been customized in any way; I saw these effects in the installation environment, and they're present from the very first boot and log in.

Please advise if there's anything I can provide that would assist in debugging this issue, such as log files. I have a fair bit of experience with Linux and several of the BSDs, but Haiku is a new platform for me, so I will need guidance in figuring out what to provide.

Thank you for your time!

[Mirage256]

Example of Graphical Errors

[Mirage256]

Photo of Graphical Issue

[Mirage256]

Well, I found something interesting - the screenshot doesn't capture the issues, they only appear on the physical screen itself. I took a photo with my phone to demonstrate. I'm nearly certain that these graphical artifacts are a software problem, as they don't show up under any other operating system, such as Windows 7 or any Linux distribution I've tried so far.

[madmax]

Well, I found something interesting - the screenshot doesn't capture the issues,

That's expected when the problem is in the graphics driver or hardware.

Please advise if there's anything I can provide

There's probably something interesting from the driver or the panel detection in the system log: /var/log/syslog.

Something you can try, apart from other color depth settings, is to boot in VESA mode, bypassing the specific driver. Select "Use fail-safe graphics driver" in the ​bootloader. You may also have to manually select the screen resolution, and even the exact one may not be available depending on BIOS, but at least it may get you a usable desktop. Include also a syslog booting in this mode.

[Mirage256]

I tried to change the color depth settings, which did affect the color of the artifacts and the amount of "snow", but didn't remove them. I am going to attach a copy of the syslog file right now as is, then reboot into the VESA only mode and report what happens (and attach copy of the system log after that as well)

[Mirage256]

/var/log/syslog before using VESA safe mode

[Mirage256]

Okay, I was able to boot into safe mode with the VESA compatibility driver. It does indeed fix the graphical glitches - the colors now lookg normal, and there is no artifacting. However, it doesn't support the native resolution of the panel, so everything looks distorted horizontally. Additionally, it didn't load the wifi drivers in safe mode, so I made a copy of the system log before rebooting and will now upload that copy.

[Mirage256]

System log after rebooting into VESA mode

[thebuck]

Replying to madmax:

Well, I found something interesting - the screenshot doesn't capture the issues,

That's expected when the problem is in the graphics driver or hardware.

The radeon_hd driver is definitely capable of screenshottable noise as well, as seen in #17664.