How to ditch nouveau driver with nVidia card
setup:
Running Debian testing
Video card (from lspci):
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV36 [GeForce
FX 5700LE] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem:
Micro-Star International ...
I'm getting some kind of horrible sequence of events on many (not all)
bootups.
It started a few months ago, and I suspect following some kind of
update but I didn't really notice it so much at first and didn't
really get busy checking into it.... Seems to have gotten worse
lately.
What happens is I get what looks like some kind of screen saver
effect, but during bootup, when X is not running. Seems to break up
the colors from the grub boot screen and makes horizontal and vertical
patterns of lines with those colors. But it takes over the screen and
no login appears, pressing enter or any other keys has no effect.
(I boot to console <No X>, calling startx when I need it)
Using a reboot usually fixes it, and it comes up normally, but lately
its taking several reboots to get a clean boot.
During the problem screen, at least I can still ssh in remotely and
tailing /var/log/messages I'm seeing piles and piles of lines like
these: (wrapped for mail)
Oct 23 06:57:05 reader kernel:
[ 52.162552] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: PFIFO_CACHE_ERROR
- Ch 0/3 Mthd 0x0be8 Data 0x03f001b8
Those lines just poor out while the goofy screen is in place.
Once I get a clean boot, no more log messages.
I see by googling that the nouveau driver has some reported bugs
(Not necessarily debian bugs) involving exactly that log error.
I'd like to go back to the old `nv' driver I used to use when running
Gentoo, or some other driver that will work with my card and just
ditch that nouveau driver.
Can anyone guide me a bit as to how to do that?
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