Bug#741584: booting T440p with Debian testing - problems

["John M." <jwmwalrus@gmail.com>]

Hi,

When the 3.14.x kernel first hit Debian testing, I tried booting without blacklisting nouveau, and got the same systemd's emergency prompt caused by disk corruption.

The recent comments related to the issue, at the github page for bumblebee's project ( https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch/issues/78 ), mention that the issue goes away by adding acpi_osi="Windows 2013" to the kernel command line. That certainly worked for me, and right now I have bumblebee-nvidia installed and working properly, and the laptop's battery consumption is down by 40-50%.

As far as I know, the acpi_osi trick doesn't solve the issue in all the cases ---e.g., it didn't work for Mr. Smith.

The bumblebee package installs its own bumblebee.conf into /etc/modprobe.d, which effectively blacklists nouveau and nvidia*, so it seems that for the NVIDIA Optimus card those modules shouldn't be loaded at all by default.

--
John.

On Sun, 2014-08-10 at 20:21 +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote: 
> Sorry we didn't respond to this earlier.
>
> On Tue, 2014-04-22 at 06:30 -0500, John M. wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > My workaround was to (boot in recovery mode and) blacklist nouveau, as
> > in:
> > 
> > # echo 'blacklist nouveau' > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
> > 
> > After that, reboot in normal mode.
> > 
> > It seems that the 3.13.x kernel is trying to load drivers for both the
> > Intel and NVIDIA cards, and there's a BIOS-related bug that makes the
> > NVIDIA card misbehave when on Linux.  Previous versions of the kernel
> > didn't do that.
> > 
> > I hope that helps.
>
> Linux is supposed to be able to switch between the Intel and Nvidia GPUs
> at run-time, so loading both drivers is right.
>
> The failure may be related to run-time power management and might be
> fixed in a later version.  Have you tested a recent kernel version with
> nouveau re-enabled?  There is currently Linux 3.14 in testing/unstable
> and 3.16 in experimental.
>
> Ben.