Bug#971871: installation-reports: bullseye wkly 20201005 - nouveau firmware

[Terry McKenna <smckenna_debian@clanlineage.com>]

Like I said it was an informational report only.  I have already moved 
on.  Via SSH, I ran tasksel and installed gnome, then nvidia and 
rebooted fine.   Now I am on to testing games with "testing" version of 
wine.

Bullseye build: It is easy enough to pop in another drive and test a new 
build when you want me to.  I use the Kingwin KF-259-BK with a stack of 
cheapish 120GB drives which I wipe between uses.  It makes testing fast 
and clean.

-Terry

On 10/9/20 10:10 AM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Control: severity -1 important
> Control: reassign -1 src:linux 5.8.10-1
> Control: retitle -1 nouveau no longer fails cleanly when firmware is missing
>
> Debian does not include non-free software, including firmware.  That's
> not a bug.  You will need to install firmware-misc-nonfree to make the
> nouveau driver fully functional.
>
> However, the driver ought to fail cleanly when firmware is missing.  At
> a minimum it should be possible to boot in text mode and then install a
> firmware package if wanted.
>
> > During a hung boot, I am able to SSH into the box to poke around and
> > send this report.
> [...]
> > Oct  8 10:36:52 petrarca kernel: [   14.118750] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nvidia/gp107/nvdec/scrubber.bin (-2)
> > Oct  8 10:36:52 petrarca kernel: [   14.118753] firmware_class: See https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for information about missing firmware
> > Oct  8 10:36:52 petrarca kernel: [   14.118760] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nvidia/gp107/acr/bl.bin (-2)
> > Oct  8 10:36:52 petrarca kernel: [   14.118762] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: acr: failed to load firmware
> > Oct  8 10:36:52 petrarca kernel: [   14.118763] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: acr: failed to load firmware
> > Oct  8 10:36:52 petrarca kernel: [   14.118764] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: acr ctor failed, -2
> > Oct  8 10:36:52 petrarca kernel: [   14.118771] nouveau: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -2
> I think that boot did complete, but without a working video driver.
> nouveau may have disabled the basic video driver (probably efifb)
> before attempting to load firmware and then finding that it can't take
> over.  Unfortunately the kernel doesn't have an API for re-enabling a
> basic video driver.
>
> There have been similar issues with the radeon and amdgpu drivers,
> which we patch to guard against this failure mode.  We might need to
> apply a similar patch for nouveau.
>
> Ben.