Roger Price wrote:
A Dell Precision 7500 with an Nvidia NVC0 (Fermi) GF100GL Quadro 4000 video card and two iiyama B2783QSU monitors, Xfce and nouveau: very nice indeed when it comes up, but after 3-30 minutes the monitors freeze and lock up. No reaction to any keyboard or mouse activity. I have to ssh to the box to restart it.
I've experienced something similar with Nouveau on the following system: Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 11 KDE Plasma Version: 5.21.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.83.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.10.0-8-amd64 OS Type: 64-bit Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 8 × AMD FX(tm)-8150 Eight-Core Processor Memory: 31.3 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: NV106But for me there's no specific time period where things go awry. My video freeze and keyboard lockup happen if I do something rather CPU and bandwidth demanding, like play a 4K movie with mpv and skip around in it, or try to do large downloads while playing a couple of movies simultaneously; anything that requires moving lots of data around seems to trigger the video freeze + keyboard lockup.
While the video is frozen and the keyboard doesn't work, other processes keep running. The mouse often still works and I can move the pointer around but I can't click on anything.
Sometimes the frozen video resumes after a while (waiting tens of minutes, perhaps an hour).
Sometimes instead of frozen video + keyboard lockup the session abruptly ends (almost like a process which manages the session had died), all of the processes I started in that session are ended, and I'm taken back to the login screen. Sometimes I can login again but the new session is quite unstable and I find I can get a little bit more stability if I reboot the system after my session is forcibly ended.
I'm not running nVidia's proprietary software. Nouveau will raise a warning that it can't find the video card's firmware. But the GUI comes up and works without said firmware.
I'm not sure if this is a problem with Nouveau (which, as I understand it, is largely the result of time-consuming and difficult reverse engineering) or something else. I don't know enough about that software to say.