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Hi, I have a very old pc on which I installed Arch. It has an ancient Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS AGP card which should be supported by nouveau. I experienced hard freezes on boot, then I have been able to boot adding nomodeset to kernel command line. This prevents the nouveau module to be loaded, so I think the problem is with this module. In fact, I have been able to randomly boot into console without nomodeset: in this cases, the nouveau module was not listed by lsmod, so I suppose that for some reason it was not loaded. Trying to load it with modprobe resulted in an immediate freeze which required a hard reboot.
I'm still not 100% sure that nouveau is the real problem but I strongly suspect it. Is there anyone else experiencing similar problems or that can give me some good advice? Thanks.
Edit: I made another check. I booted with nomodeset, then started X manually. Now nouveau is loaded since lsmod shows it, but AFAIK nouveau works only with KMS...
Last edited by snack (2013-04-17 21:24:09)
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Hi, you could try the nv driver instead of nouveau to see if it is a driver issue. Install the xf86-video-nv package and be sure that the xorg server chooses to use it at startup.
And yes nouveau needs KMS to work.
Good luck.
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Thanks berbae, but I'd like to continue using nouveau, it worked perfectly some time ago (I didn't boot my ol' faithful for a long time, and after a long but successful battle against glibc, /bin migration to /usr/bin, pacman 4.0 and sysvinit->systemd migration all at once my system is again up and kicking except for this nouveau issue). I found a working configuration, in fact I'm writing from my old pc. The funny thing is that it seems I'm really running on nouveau without KMS:
$ uname -a
Linux maldiluna 3.8.8-1-ck #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Apr 17 12:59:47 EDT 2013 i686 GNU/Linux
$ grep nomodeset /boot/grub/grub.cfg
linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux-ck root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/12ab7b34-c62e-4cdd-8aeb-b2b036cf1b03 ro elevator=bfq nomodeset
$ lsmod | grep nouveau
nouveau 810739 0
mxm_wmi 1135 1 nouveau
wmi 7163 2 mxm_wmi,nouveau
video 9834 1 nouveau
ttm 46707 1 nouveau
drm_kms_helper 31122 1 nouveau
drm 181000 3 ttm,drm_kms_helper,nouveau
i2c_algo_bit 4583 1 nouveau
button 3717 1 nouveau
i2c_core 18994 6 drm,i2c_i801,drm_kms_helper,i2c_algo_bit,of_i2c,nouveauIf I remove nomodeset from kernel parameters the system freezes during boot almost always.
I'm satisfied with this setting since my system works, but I'm really curious about nomodeset/nouveau (nouveau should really work only with KMS). If there is anyone who can give me some wise word on this I would be grateful; I can also provide more info if someone is interested in understanding what's going on.
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With 'nomodeset' kernel parameter the 'nouveau' driver cannot be used by xorg server; it will use another one which it finds available, nv or vesa; you can see which one by looking into the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file; look also in the kernel journal log.
There are infos about KMS at http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting
So even if the 'nouveau' module is loaded, you don't use it with 'nomodeset'.
I suggested using the nv driver only for testing purpose.
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I did some testing: I removed all the nouveau, nv and vesa drivers, enabled KMS by removing "nomodeset" from kernel parameters and tried to boot into console. The system freeze happened as before, so I tried to add again nomodeset and the boot could finish successfully again. So I would say that it's not a nouveau-related issue, but rather a KMS problem. I tried both with stock and ck kernel, same behaviour. My machine has an old integrated Intel VGA (an i815 chipset): I tried to enable and disable it from bios since the monitor is attached to the Nvidia discrete card, but it made no difference.
I clearly remember that some kernel versions ago KMS worked perfectly, but as I said I didn't boot up the machine for a long time so I can't say when the issue appeared.
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What I can tell is to look into the log files to see what happens when it works and when it doesn't.
Post what you find in the logs, so someone could possibly see the problem.
And as it is old hardware, you can also try the -lts kernel.
Say also if you want to use that machine in graphical environment or in console only mode.
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The LTS kernel works flawlessly: KMS is not an issue and I can use both the nv and nouveau driver. So there might be something wrong for my hardware in recent kernels... I guess I'll play a bit with nouveau and LTS, but 2D performance in LXDE (I want to use a light desktop environment) seems slightly better with new kernel and nv. Thanks berbae for your precious tips, I think that my issue is solved (at least, I'm happy with this solution for now).
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