[gentoo-user] Re: nouveau loads but freezes later, nvidia won't load

[walt]

On 10/20/2010 12:56 PM, Grant wrote:
>>> I've been using the nouveau video driver for a while, but lately video
>>> has been freezing with X at 100% CPU and the only way out seems to be
>>> ssh'ing in and rebooting.
>>
>> Not that it will help with your bug, but I'm curious to know what video
>> hardware you're using.  I had the same problem with my ancient nv34 card,
>> which got fixed a few weeks ago in Linus's git kernel.
>
> I'm not sure of the actual chip, but I get this from lspci -v:
>
> nVidia Corporation C77 [GeForce 8100 / nForce 720a]
>
> It's an onboard chip on my motherboard.  Can you tell me in what
> version of the Linux kernel you found the problem to be solved?

In my particular case it was this commit, but I get the impression that there
are still unfixed bugs that cause very similar symptoms:

commit 3ba6462355c1c69dde58739a871d13bbb993e2e3
Author: Francisco Jerez
Date:   Sat Aug 28 17:56:33 2010 +0200

     drm/nouveau: Take fence spinlock before reading the last sequence.

     It fixes a race between the TTM delayed work queue and the GEM IOCTLs
     (fdo bug 29583) uncovered by the BKL removal.

That patch was made on Aug 28, so Linus probably committed it in early
September, maybe 2.6.36-rc3 or thereabouts.

If you're serious about testing the nouveau driver I suggest you try the
latest nouveau kernel sources from here:

git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/nouveau/linux-2.6

I just pulled the latest changes from that repository, approx 40 changesets,
and not one of them applies to my poor old forgotten NV34 chip, so I'm losing
interest in nouveau at this point.  But your hardware is much newer and it may
be worth your while to test the latest changes.  It's certainly easy to do.