Arch Linux

Patalo

Member

Registered: 2012-06-05

Posts: 2

Lots of troubles with proprietary NVIDIA driver

Hi,

I need help because I have such an amount of troubles with NVIDIA proprietary drivers that using my laptop is becoming really hard.
I will try to be as precise as I can.

So, in a nutshell :
- I had the proprietary driver a while ago, without any of these problems
- Switching to nouveau driver resolves all these problems (but sadly I'm currently on applications with high gpu usage and nouveau don't handle this well enough...)
- I have no clue what update or config I made caused the problems since I only recently reswitch to proprietary (so the incompabilities appeared while I was on nouveau)

The problems :
- Flash plugin crashes really often when playing videos (disabling hardware acceleration in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg "solves" the problem, but no more fullscreen 720p )
- I can't switch to any tty, it will only show a black screen
- Computer will always freeze when I switch off : screen goes black, sometimes the hdds will be switched off, sometimes not, but computer never switch off, I have to force it.
- Sysrq keys won't work (they are configured and I'm pretty sure they worked with nouveau)

My system :
- NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT
- DELL Vostro 1500 laptop
- I use KDE
- everything's up to date
(edit forgot that) - 32 bits installation

I just noted that removing the vga= parameters at boot seems to fix the tty and power off problems. But flash's crash remains.

The nouveau module is blacklisted (with /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf).
I delete nouveau from /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and regenerated kernel image.
There is nothing suspitious in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old shows normal stop.
There is no such problem with Windows.

Thanks a lot for reading this, and please tell me if you have any clue for what the source is.

Last edited by Patalo (2012-06-05 20:53:39)

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,607

Re: Lots of troubles with proprietary NVIDIA driver

If a framebuffer console (vga=) is giving you problems, then don't use it. Yeah, not really good advice . But not much else can be done, the nvidia driver doesn't handle the console and issues with it are low priority for the nvidia devs.

Flash crashes are flash's fault. Complain to Adobe, but since they've stopped developing flash for linux (except for security fixes), you won't get anywhere with that. You can downgrade to 10.3.183.19, it has all security issues fixed, but who knows how long Adobe will keep fixing 10.3. You can also try without overlay (export VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1), this minimizes the crashes, but doesn't get rid of them completely. The only other possibility is using Chrome/Chromium with PepperFlash.

Last edited by Gusar (2012-06-05 21:12:34)

Patalo

Member

Registered: 2012-06-05

Posts: 2

Re: Lots of troubles with proprietary NVIDIA driver

Thanks for the tips. The overlay options didn't seems to change anything but the Pepper plugins runs fine. (I didn't know the Pepper plugin was already out, thanks!). But it bugs me to switch browser because of flash videos...

But for the console and switch off problems, I spoke too fast, even without framebuffer console I still got black screen when switching to console and freeze when switching off.
(I'm using the word "switch" to much )
I just found the exact same problem, seems to be «normal» : https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=136751 (I don't understand how I didn't find it before.) Well, not really solvable at the moment, beside massive downgrade...

Thanks again for the Flash tips