GPU lock ups when starting GDM, SDDM, and Plasma Desktop
Submitted by Mingcong Bai
Assigned to Nouveau Project
Description
Here on a PowerMac G5 with a NVIDIA GeForce 6600LE graphics card, most things run pretty well except for some of the things I wanted to run on the machine resulted in nouveau GPU lock-ups, and consequently a glitched display (artifacts only).
When trying to start GDM, SDDM, or Plasma Desktop on the machine, the display locks up, and I was able to salvage an error message as follows:
[drm] nouveau 0000:0a:00.0: GPU lockup - switching to software fbcon
After a minute or two, the display responds again, but only showing a black background with several randomly colored pixels, and some white blocks.
However, this graphics card runs LightDM, XFCE, MATE... and most other applications without such error and lock-ups. I was able to workaround the issue by using the nouveau.noaccel=1 kernel parameter (except in the case of GDM, it returned with the same error), but that simply beats the purpose of owning a graphics card.
However, even with the noaccel parameter in place, I was still experiencing bad coloring issues, as reported here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98630.
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Some version info:
- Linux Kernel 4.8.6 (with 4K paging in case you are wondering)
- Mesa 13.0.0
- Xorg Server 1.18.4
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P.S.
I tried on with a Quadro FX4500, which simply shows the lock up error whenever attempting to start X. But I couldn't make sure if it's a hardware issue or not, as the card sparked on the first power up, that's why I have already returned it...