Xorg Issues on Mac Pro (2008)

iMike · 2019-02-14 18:48:48

I'm having the same difficulty as cxb described two years ago in
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=218198. I have the same machine (Mac Pro 3,1, full hw probe of my machine and the same graphics card (GeForce 8800 GT). My question is: can anyone guide me as to how to resolve this problem? I can think of some next steps, but I also know it would be easy to go down rabbit holes leading nowhere but taking a lot of time.

I've done some testing, and to summarize, have found:

Proprietary NVIDIA driver results in not even the console appearing. Could still ssh in though. Kernel showed following messages. I used nvidia-340xx-lts. The errors are:
```
NVRM: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x25:0xffffffff:1197)
NVRM: rm_init_adapter failed for device bearing minor number 0
NVRM: nvidia_frontend_open: minor 0, module->open() failed, error -5
```
I tried together and individually kernel parameters: pcie_aspm=off rcutree.rcu_idle_gp_delay=1, but that didn't help.
Nouveau drivers results in console, but startx/initx go just up to "NOUVEAU(0): NVEnterVT is called." then nothing more. Kernel shows "fifo: DMA_PUSHER...DRM...err: MEM_FAULT" and "trapped read...PT_NOT_PRESENT" errors. So ssh works, but no X at all, and hung console.
Trying vesa driver in X config with nvidia-340xx-lts uninstalled gives config problem. I have not looked further into this yet.
Trying nv driver in X config with nvidia-340xx-lts uninstalled gives module "nv" not found. I guess you can only use driver "nouveau" now?
Trying fbdev in X config works! No X config errors, but kernel says in addition to "nouveaufb (fb0) is primary device" that I'm getting the same MEM_FAULT and PT_NOT_PRESENT errors as before. The X screen is awful, with a lot of horizontal line artifacts. By the way, the display is just a simple BenQ 24" 1080p.

I am not looking to use the machine for gaming, or anything very fancy. I just want a decent X and processing that will beat the even older machine I use daily. The NVIDIA card that's in it should give better graphics than I use now and should even be able to do stuff like CUDA. At this point I would be more than thrilled just to have plain old X working on it. Thank you in advance for any tips.

seth · 2019-02-14 23:04:08

This sounds like stupid, but did you setup a GPT or an MBR partition scheme?
See this thread, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173184 and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mac#NVIDIA_note (and links - the nvidia chip gets an abnormal config by the EFI)

iMike · 2019-02-15 13:46:00

I only ever planned on running Arch on this machine. (Also, it didn't come with any disks or MacOS, making the decision even easier :-) I put in a disk, installed Arch on a thumb drive, booted from the thumb drive and proceeded to setup the disk as GPT with a efi partition. MBR: protective. I setup rEFInd as the boot loader. rEFInd's boot screen looks beautiful, by the way, which is frustrating because once rEFInd has launched Arch, I get the artifacts and a bad-looking console.

Thanks for pointed me at those two threads! It might take me some time to wrap my head around them. I did notice one of the guys, srs5694, who seems to be the rEFInd developer, said:

srs5694 wrote:

If you can work around your graphics problems in EFI mode, I recommend you do so. I've had some recent dealing with somebody who was having problems with the proprietary Nvidia driver; using the open-source Nouveau driver instead got the system working. You might try that, assuming you've trying to use the proprietary driver.

so it seems like UEFI mode should be OK. I would be more than happy if I could get nouveau running. According to NVIDIA's page, their support for my graphics cards runs out at the end of 2019 anyway. On the other hand, srs5694 also says

srs5694 wrote:

Macs are weird. If you follow PC instructions on a Mac, you will run into problems.

I would have never thought of the disk partitioning scheme as a possible cause of my graphics problems, so thank you for putting me on the trail of that. Also, here I thought I had read everything on the Arch pages about my situation, but I had completely missed that there is a Mac page! I'm more familiar with Gentoo, so I still have a lot of arch to learn.
PS, gdisk says:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.4

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sda: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
Model: ST1000LM014-1EJ1
Sector size (logical/physical): 512/4096 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): D3D05AAE-ECA9-4852-9D97-489A2968EA7A
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 6 sectors (3.0 KiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1              40          409639   200.0 MiB   EF00  EFI System Partition
   2          409640         4603943   2.0 GiB     8300  Linux filesystem
   3         4603944        67518503   30.0 GiB    8304  Linux x86-64 root (/)
   4        67518504       109461543   20.0 GiB    8200  Linux swap
   5       109461544       155598887   22.0 GiB    8300  Linux filesystem
   6       155598888       163987495   4.0 GiB     8302  Linux /home
   7       163987496      1953525134   853.3 GiB   8E00  Linux LVM

Last edited by iMike (2019-02-15 18:59:47)

Arch Linux

#1 2019-02-14 18:48:48

Xorg Issues on Mac Pro (2008)

#2 2019-02-14 23:04:08

Re: Xorg Issues on Mac Pro (2008)

#3 2019-02-15 13:46:00

Re: Xorg Issues on Mac Pro (2008)

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