Lately I've had two laptops randomly glitch their screens at me. At first I worried their hinges were starting to give out (the connectors in those things are scarely fragile), but I noticed a message in dmesg:

i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun

That sure looked related to seeing glitches on my display. Now, how to solve.

After some digging through Linux distribution forums (still existing and findable through Google Web search thankfully!), and having the Arch forum and Arch wiki saying the i915.enable_psr=0 Linux kernel boot parameter could very likely help, I put that piece on the appropriate line in the /etc/default/grub file of my Kubuntu laptop. However, the ThinkPad that runs Pop!_OS does not have a grub 'defaults' file. Or... grub at all. Right. OK, so of course systemd-boot is a thing (I totally knew that!), especially in combination with the UEFI firmware loading mechanism of modern machines.

It has a config file too right, like grub? Hm no, EFI directly loads the kernel, so how does that... Ah here: /boot/efi/loader/entries/ - that directory contains files like Pop_OS-current.conf and Pop_OS-oldkern.conf, which sound like they will surely be overwritten the next time there's a kernel update.

Long story short, use kernelstub -a i915.enable_psr=0 to make it permanent. It persists the defaults in /etc/kernelstub/configuration, and immediately updates to EFI bootloader entries so next boot you're good to go. Now, fingers crossed it actually prevents the glitching.