Re: How to ditch nouveau driver with nVidia card
On 2013-10-23 14:26 +0200, Harry Putnam wrote:
> 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)
Do you use plymouth?
> 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.
It would be useful to test a 3.11 kernel and libgl1-mesa-dri from
unstable. However, it's just possible that your graphics hardware is
starting to fail.
> 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?
You could boot with the nomodeset kernel parameter, which should give
you the vesa driver under X. Alternatively, boot with nouveau.noaccel=1
to disable acceleration.
Cheers,
Sven
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