Re: Blank screen at boot with kernel 3.1
On 2012-01-25 18:04 +0100, Rémi Moyen wrote:
> I am also guessing, based on this (why didn't I think about that
> earlier?) that in the 3.1 kernel, my card is supposed to be supported
> by nouveau, hence it tries to use it (and this causes all my problems)
> whereas in 2.6.32 it doesn't even try to use nouveau and falls back to
> vesafb or something like it, hence it still manages to display
> something. Does this makes sense, or is this gibberish?
It makes sense, but since you seem to have the problem even with
"nomodeset", it might not actually be the cause.
>> You have to use either the NVidia blob or nouveau with a kernel >= 3.2
>> and libgl1-mesa-dri package >= 7.11.1-1.
>
> Hmm... Why do you say 3.2? Is there something specific that was added
> in nouveau in 3.2? Support for my card, I guess?
No, but earlier kernels had acceleration disabled for your card.
> Where did you find this information?
On upstream's wiki¹ there is a link to the relevant kernel commit².
> Kernel 3.2 seems to be still in unstable, I'd rather not install
> something from there if I can avoid it.
No, 3.2 has been in testing for six days, 3.1 is not supported anymore.
And yesterday's upload to unstable fixed a local root exploit³, so it's
really time to upgrade.
>> If you want to make sure nouveau does not do anything harmful (or
>> useful) ever, boot with the "nomodeset" kernel parameter.
>
> I tried that, but it didn't change anything. OK, maybe I did it wrong?
>
> * To blacklist nouveau, there needs to be a "blacklist nouveau" line
> somewhere in a file in /etc/modprobe.d. The nvidia DKMS package does
> this (or I did that manually), but apparently this is not enough.
It is enough to prevent udev from loading the module, but X will still
try to load it if you don't specify a different driver in xorg.xonf.
> I've yet to try running depmod -ae and regenerating the initrd
> afterwards, could not doing it be a reason why nouveau is not properly
> blacklisted?
Only if you have added the module to the initramfs yourself, which is
unlikely. If you see the message "INIT: version 2.88 booting" in text
mode, your initramfs does not load it.
> * To completely disable nouveau, I should pass nomodeset to the
> kernel. I tried doing this by modifying the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
> (or GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX) in /etc/default/grub and then running
> update-grub, this does not seem to work (then rebooting). Is it the
> right way to set this parameter?
If you want to set it permanently, yes.
Sven
¹ http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/InstallDRM#Firmware
¹ http://cgit.freedesktop.org/nouveau/linux-2.6/commit/?id=80859760daa01fb38497aa6326a32a16489d8c97
³ http://lwn.net/Articles/476684/
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