Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

allora · 2019-02-10 03:07:05

This seems to be pretty specific.

I have a 2010 macbook pro with an nvidia geforce 320m in it and 8GB ram, and through me using EFI, its using the Nouveau drivers, as nvidia official don't work in this kind of setup. Its a pretty old system a friend gave to me for free which I use loosely as sort of a tinker around kind of machine and on trips to watch things like netflix.

This has actually been fine for quite some time, however recently (since maybe Dec 2018?) electron apps have been problematic. Typically, they will start up and the contents of their windows will be blank. It doesn't seem to matter which electron apps I use be it vs code, atom or discord. After some digging, it appears that when i try using electron apps, the video card runs out of memory. Giving me errors like this:

[8270:0209/184521.627081:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(2523)] [GroupMarkerNotSet(crbug.com/242999)!:E893DC490B0D0000]GL ERROR :GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY : BackFramebuffer::Create: <- error from previous GL command

Lo and behold, running electron apps with --disable-gpu flag, solves this problem, however now my machine obviously has to work harder to simply run these apps. And in many cases this is pretty slow, as you'd imagine on dated hardware.

Obviously discord can be run in a browser window (firefox) and that has no issues with GPU. But for things that don't have a web front end, this presents a problem.

Everything is up to date, latest kernel and the like. I suspect a nouveau update at some point may have caused this to occur. But I'm not super sure. Anyway if anyone's got any ideas.. I'm all ears?

seth · 2019-02-10 08:04:34

as nvidia official don't work in this kind of setup

I beg your pardon? nvidia-340xx* should work, no? (I know it's a MCP89 rather than a GT21x, but nvidia officially lists the chip as supported by the driver)

allora · 2019-02-10 19:55:02

On this macbook, if you dont boot linux in legacy mbr mode, you can't use nvidia official drivers. See the wiki.

Yes you are correct. nvidia-340xx does work on this hardware, assuming legacy mbr mode. Thanks to Apple's non standard EFI implementation, compatible nvidia drivers dont exist when using EFI.

So short of me rebuilding the system for legacy mbr mode.. its not like i can try using the nvidia drivers.

Last edited by allora (2019-02-10 19:56:33)

seth · 2019-02-10 21:07:17

Meh. (Keep that in mind in case you ever reset the system ;-)

Are you using xf86-video-nouveau or the modesetting driver (check the xorg log)?
Does altering it make a difference?

allora · 2019-02-10 22:17:17

It would appear that nouveau gets loaded over the modesetting driver.. But the error here is curious.

[   280.552] (II) UnloadModule: "modesetting"
[   280.552] (II) Unloading modesetting
[   280.553] (II) UnloadModule: "vesa"
[   280.553] (II) Unloading vesa
[   280.554] (II) NOUVEAU(0): Channel setup complete.
[   280.555] (EE) NOUVEAU(0): [COPY] failed to allocate class.
[   280.618] (II) NOUVEAU(0): Hardware support for Present enabled
[   280.620] (II) NOUVEAU(0): [DRI2] Setup complete
[   280.620] (II) NOUVEAU(0): [DRI2]   DRI driver: nouveau
[   280.620] (II) NOUVEAU(0): [DRI2]   VDPAU driver: nouveau

seth · 2019-02-10 22:19:26

The modesetting driver is "built in" - all considered modules are loaded and then dumped but for the best match and required ones.
Drop xf86-video-nouveau and see what happens.

allora · 2019-02-10 22:28:15

Yes, hence why i said the nouveau driver was getting loaded

Anyway, I can try that.

allora · 2019-02-10 23:04:15

Doesnt appear to matter which driver is used.

seth · 2019-02-11 08:15:21

Other things to try:
- the lts kernel (on whether it's an issue in the nouveau kernel module)
- no desktop environment (on whether it's a genuine VRAM OOM and can be mitigated by taking other stuff off; what session kind is this anyway?)
- (the nvidia blob…)

Arch Linux

#1 2019-02-10 03:07:05

Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#2 2019-02-10 08:04:34

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#3 2019-02-10 19:55:02

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#4 2019-02-10 21:07:17

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#5 2019-02-10 22:17:17

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#6 2019-02-10 22:19:26

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#7 2019-02-10 22:28:15

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#8 2019-02-10 23:04:15

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

#9 2019-02-11 08:15:21

Re: Macbook pro 2010 GLES2 out of memory in electron apps.

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