Re: nouveau driver bugs
On 2012-11-02 19:20 +0100, Worrier Poet wrote:
> On 11/02/2012 10:42 AM, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> On 2012-10-30 12:53:24 -0400, Worrier Poet wrote:
>>> The guys developing free drivers for the Nvidia graphics cards seem to
>>> have a lot harder job to do, but they also seem to be up to the task.
>>> It's coming along slowly, but the nouveau drivers are most certainly
>>> working well enough for me. I also think that getting rid of the nv
>>> drivers (useful as they were for a while) was the best thing to do.
>>
>> The nouveau driver is a bit buggy, one of the most annoying bugs
>> for me: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=640464
>>
>> And I wonder whether
>>
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=689514
>>
>> is related.
>>
>> Both problems are 100% reproducible on my two machines (both having
>> a Nvidia card and the nouveau driver from Debian/unstable).
>>
>> Unfortunately it is not possible to try the nv driver on a recent
>> system.
>>
>
> Interesting. I haven't seen any of the described behaviors, though our
> two Nvidia systems are used almost exclusively by my wife these days.
> I'll ask her, or maybe experiment with her systems this weekend.
Virtually all nouveau bugs are hardware dependent; with my NV86 I
cannot reproduce Vincent's bug or any other in the BTS. OTOH, some time
ago I ran into a problem where suspending was broken in Linux 3.5, and
that bug was specific to _my_ card (it was fixed in 3.6 and 3.5.5).
> We use Xfce 4.8 and its standard WM for that DE (xfwm4). One of the
> Nvidia cards is an old gaming card, and the other is a high end CAD card
> (Quadro somethin-or-other).
>
> Both of those cards gave us fits using the proprietary drivers under
> Ubuntu and Gnome a couple of years ago. Weird things kept happening to
> various parts of Gnome. Since switching to nouveau / Xfce / Debian we've
> seen no such problems.
>
> But I'll try following the instructions in the bug report for
> reproducing the glitches if I get a chance this weekend, just for my own
> edification.
If you can reproduce them, don't hesitate to follow up. If not, and
your hardware is different from Vincent's, do not bother.
> These days, I try to stick with integrated Intel graphics for my own boxes.
That would be my choice on new systems as well.
> And, yeah, I did fall back on the nv driver earlier on when nouveau was
> still pretty iffy. The nv driver was still better for us than the
> proprietary drivers, but I guess it turned out to be pretty
> "proprietary" in its own way and had to go bye-bye from Debian. I think
> it was probably the right way for the distro to go -- even if it did
> cause a lot of us some pain in the transition.
One could argue whether it was the right choice to make nouveau the
default driver in squeeze, but other distributions had already made the
same decision, e.g. Ubuntu 10.04.
Cheers,
Sven
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