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bodysativa

Member

Registered: 2012-11-04

Posts: 17

HP EliteBook 8540w, NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M + nouveau

Hello,

At the beginning I was using Nvidia's binary blob as a driver. Then, Nvidia moved support from my chipset to legacy blobs, and because at the time those blobs were incompatible with my Xorg version, I've decided to switch to nouveau. For long time nouveau worked perfectly without any problems, but since maybe 2 months and few kernel updates back, I'm having strange hangups of the system.

The screen freezes (there are no updates to the screen), but the cursor moves normally. I can't click anything, the keyboard doesn't appear to work, caps lock doesn't work, num lock doesn't work. I haven't checked if network is working yet (i.e. if I can ping the laptop in this mode from another computer). Sometimes there are slight screen corruptions on the screen. Sometimes the screen is without any corruptions.

After restart (forced power cycle) everything is working again. After restart, I'm checking dmesg, lots of times there's nothing out of the ordinary there, but sometimes there are lines like those:

[51326.440679] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: fifo: DMA_PUSHER - ch 3 [Xorg[1031]] get 002003d534 put 002003d544 ib_get 000002c3 ib_put 000002e2 state 80000020 (err: INVALID_CMD) push 00400040
[51353.003945] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: fifo: DMA_PUSHER - ch 3 [Xorg[1031]] get 00200311f4 put 0020033234 ib_get 00000191 ib_put 00000194 state 80000000 (err: INVALID_CMD) push 00400040

Today a strange thing happened, because instead of hanging up, the items on the screen started to corrupt; terminal suddenly started to 'lose background', showing up the desktop wallpaper directly under text in the terminal, some red pixels clustered in some places, I could switch to physical console, save dmesg in there, and switch to Xorg again without problems, but it didn't help with the corruptions, there were still active. So I've saved dmesg and restarted normally. The screen is OK now. Here's the dmesg:

http://pastebin.com/EVLQNY1k

I'm using Xfce 4.12. I've checked this on normal and LTS kernels.

Does anyone have a similar issue? Do you think it's a corruption of hardware or a problem in nouveau?

Last edited by bodysativa (2017-03-10 05:21:56)

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

Re: HP EliteBook 8540w, NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M + nouveau

Does anyone have a similar issue? Do you think it's a corruption of hardware or a problem in nouveau?

That can be quite easily checked by switching to mesa.

---

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bodysativa

Member

Registered: 2012-11-04

Posts: 17

Re: HP EliteBook 8540w, NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M + nouveau

I'm sorry for my ignorance, I'm not very knowledgeable in the topic of graphics stack on Linux, but isn't nouveau a part of mesa?

Could you give me some pointers what should I read to learn how to switch from nouveau to mesa?

bodysativa

Member

Registered: 2012-11-04

Posts: 17

Re: HP EliteBook 8540w, NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M + nouveau

For now I've switched to binary nvidia-340xx blob. If it'll hang/corrupt the screen on this driver, it will be probably a strong suggestion that hardware is the problem.

Thanks anyway.

sl1pkn07

Member

From: Spanishtán

Registered: 2010-03-30

Posts: 371

Re: HP EliteBook 8540w, NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M + nouveau

simply remove the nvidia blob drivers and install the mesa related packages (mesa and mesa-libgl)

make sure you not have blacklisted the module nouveau in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file

little offtopic:

also, you can change the graphic card in this laptop (i have the same model).

The GPU is in socket MXM 3.0a (avoid MXM 3.0b models). the maximun upgrade is a "newer" cards Nvidia Quadro 2000M or ATI Firepro M5950 (this one need a special firmware)

you also need change the cpu/gpu heatsink model 595768-001 (for ATI) or 595766-001 (for NVIDIA Quadro FX1800)

greetings

bodysativa

Member

Registered: 2012-11-04

Posts: 17

Re: HP EliteBook 8540w, NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M + nouveau

@sl1pkn07 very useful, thanks! Now I know not all is lost if the hardware is the problem. I like this model a lot, it's the best laptop I've had, I wouldn't want to lose it .

For now after changing the driver from nouveau to binary blob nothing was corrupted yet, but previously it happened once every few days, so I'll need to wait and see what will happen.