Arch Linux

Aton

Member

Registered: 2013-04-02

Posts: 70

GPU lockup using nouveau driver

Hey,

about two days ago, I started noticing weird behaviour
of the nouveau driver which I believe may be related to the
most recent update of xf86-video-nouveau.

Either X wouldn't start at all or it would crash at random
times during the session.
Journalctl was putting out a lot of error messages concerning
mem_faults and cache_errors.

I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware problem as I'm running a dual-boot
system with Windows 7 and I haven't experienced any problems so far.
I've got a GeForce 8400M GS.

Sometimes, after a reboot even the boot screen and the grub menu
wouldn't show up (black screen), dropping me right into tty1.

I believe the following lines from journalctl are relevant:

kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] checking PRAMIN for image...
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] ... checksum invalid
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] checking PROM for image...
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] ... signature not found
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] checking ACPI for image...
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] ... signature not found
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] checking PCIROM for image...
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] ... appears to be valid
kernel: nouveau  [   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] using image from PCIROM
kernel: nouveau E[   VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] 0xc581[ ]: unknown opcode 0x00
kernel: nouveau W[     DRM] voltage table 0x66 unknown
kernel: nouveau E[     DRM] GPU lockup - switching to software fbcon

Note that sometimes everything looks fine.
If that is the case, PRAMIN ``appears to be valid''.

Any help would be appreciated!

P.S.: I just removed the package xf86-video-nouveau but the same
messages still appear. I believe this is somehow related to nouveau
being part of the kernel now, though I don't really know what I
have uninstalled then.

Aton

Member

Registered: 2013-04-02

Posts: 70

Re: GPU lockup using nouveau driver

I tried to add "nouveau.vbios=pramin" to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet nouveau.vbios=pramin"

but then I only got a black screen (no boot screen, no grub menu, no tty1).
I could still login blindly though and managed to remove "nouveau.vbios=pramin" again.
Now I'm back at the initial situation.