KDE Plasma 5.10.3 Fixes Longstanding NVIDIA VT/Suspend Issue

KDE Plasma 5.10.3 has been released as the newest bug-fix update to Plasma 5. For NVIDIA Linux users in particular this upgrade should be worthwhile.

Plasma 5.10.3 has fixed a NVIDIA suspend issue that dates back to at least 2015, "Often after I suspend my machine, wait some time and resume back, I see sometimes black, other times corrupted screen with blinking triangles of distorted windows content. This happens on at least two machines I'm working on, both with nvidia video cards."

The problem originated with a change in KWin while the workaround was adding support for the GLX_NV_robustness_video_memory_purge extension. NV_robustness_video_memory_purge allows for applications to be notified when video memory has been purged.

Besides suspend/resume events, VT switches could sometimes cause the video memory to be evicted, which would also trigger this KDE bug. While this is acknowledged as a limitation of the NVIDIA OpenGL driver, the OpenGL specification doesn't specify where the video memory is allowed to be cleared, thus the need for this extension. But NVIDIA does plan to modify their OpenGL driver to allow for more persistent video memory.

Besides KDE Plasma 5.10.3 fixing VBOs/FBOs needing remapping in this case, this bug fix release also has other KWin fixes, support for shadows on windows 100% width or height, a new KDE_NO_GLOBAL_MENU environment variable, and other fixes.

More details on Plasma 5.10.3 at KDE.org.