Black Screen on VSCodium with Flatpak
~1 minute read
On a new machine, I couldn't make VSCodium work properly since it was showing a black screen at launch. This issue is related to Flatpak and graphic card driver.
On a new machine powered by 13th Gen Intel Core i5 with an integrated Iris Xe Graphics, the Flatpak installation of VSCodium was leading to a black screen and a frozen application. For other applications installed through Flatpak, I didn't have such issue.
To have more info on the problem, I started the app through the Terminal enabling the --verbose option:
flatpak run com.vscodium.codium --verbose
The following error was displayed:
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
glx: failed to create dri3 screen
failed to load driver: iris
Somehow, Flatpak (or the app) wanted to use the new iris driver to render the application.
It is possible to solve this issue by forcing the i915 driver to load with the following command: flatpak run --env=MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i915 com.vscodium.codium
To force this choice by default, we can add a new environment variable to Flatpak with: flatpak override --user --env=MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i915 com.vscodium.codium
After that, VSCodium was displayed correctly.