Arch Linux

jameh0

Member

Registered: 2013-04-06

Posts: 40

Nvidia duo card + EFI + ttys dysfunction

I've been having trouble getting UEFI to work successfully on this computer in conjunction with drivers for my graphics cards.

I believe that the peculiarity of my hardware setup might be to blame. I have a MacBook Pro 5,2 with Nvidia GeForce 9400M with 256 MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory and Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT with 256 MB or 512 MB of GDDR3 SDRAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbook_p … ications_2

Firstly, the Nvidia proprietary driver (319.17 from arch repo) does not require modesetting, so it is loaded when X starts. However, when booted from EFI GRUB, startx (with no .xinitrc) fails to a blank screen, disappearing my tty consoles too. But, if I instead start gdm.service, gnome starts fine (visible), but ttys are still disappeared.

After starting gnome in this way, I run "dmesg | grep -i nvidia" to these lines
(note
00:03.5 is NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Co-processor (rev b1)
02:00.0 is NVIDIA Corporation G96M [GeForce 9600M GT] (rev a1)
03:00.0 is NVIDIA Corporation C79 [GeForce 9400M] (rev b1)
):

[   12.390784] nvidia: probe of 0000:00:03.5 failed with error -1
[   12.390816] nvidia 0000:02:00.0: enabling device (0002 -> 0003)
[   12.391092] nvidia 0000:03:00.0: enabling device (0002 -> 0003)
[   12.391207] nvidia 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[   12.391675] [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 20130102 for 0000:02:00.0 on minor 0
[   12.392450] [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 20130102 for 0000:03:00.0 on minor 1
[   12.393392] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  319.17  Thu Apr 25 22:45:49 PDT 2013

Moving on to Nouveau, I set up Kernel Mode Setting by adding nouveau to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, and run "mkinitcpio -p linux". One time trying to boot after this echoed a message about mde error, and rebooted. All other times, as far as I can tell, the boot process halts after echoing "running early hook". <- This behaviour is the same if I am booting from EFI as when I am using an emulated BIOS with grub-pc.

I'm a little out of my depth with where to start looking for the issue. The only setup that works reliably (with graphics + ttys) is starting Nvidia driver after BIOS boot, but I have no control over switching between graphics cards through nvidia-settings, and BIOS adds at least 5 seconds to my boot.

I'd like a recommendation for where to investigate further. My feeling is that I should figure out what's going wrong with Mode Setting nouveau, because it is open-sourced, but I would be happy with a solution using the nvidia driver that rescues my ttys from their current black void state.

Last edited by jameh0 (2013-05-25 22:00:11)

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Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friends.