As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I upgraded a laptop from Linux Mint 17.3 ("Rebecca") to 18.0 ("Sarah") with minimal difficulties. My laptop serves as a guinea pig for these things. Once I'm sure things work fine on the laptop, I'll consider upgrading my desktop as well.
A few days ago I finally undertook the desktop upgrade. By this time the current Mint version was 18.1 ("Serena"). I was expecting a smooth ride, because I forgot one key difference between laptop and desktop: the desktop has an NVIDIA display card. I can't believe I forgot to take that into account, because I've written before about problems with NVIDIA hardware drivers.
Shortening (somewhat) a long and painful story, the initial upgrade left the system with an unusable display, forcing me to do a fresh install of 18.1 from CD (which, among other things, removed a whole lot of packages that will need to be reinstalled). Even after that, the display was an adventure.
The initial installation gave me a choice between the open-source Nouveau driver and version 304.132 of the NVIDIA "legacy" driver. This is the same version that previously caused major headaches. Last time it cause a black screen. This time, presumably due to updates in some system modules, I actually got the background for my desktop (with the Mint logo) and ... something. At first it showed only the upper left corner of my desktop, but after assorted uninstall/reinstall/desperately-try-something machinations, I got to the point where it showed the entire desktop ... except the start button and bottom panel. Oh, and windows did not have the maximize/minimize/close controls, some windows could be dragged while others could not, I don't think I could resize windows, and for some reason the menu button in Firefox didn't work. Other than that, things were peachy. I tried using the sgfxi script to change driver versions, but there was no joy to be had. Of the subset of listed versions that I tried (there were too many to mess with every one), the older ones were allegedly incompatible with one of the libraries (Xorg, I think) and the newer ones had the same problems (or were incompatible).
So I decided to stick with the Nouveau drivers, which install with Mint and are the default choice. Their behavior was also a bit odd. Depending on where I was coming from (fresh install, switching from NVIDIA to Nouveau, something else), they might recognize my 1920x1080 Samsung monitor correctly or they might think that my only monitor was a laptop display (limited to 640x480 resolution). The latter resulted in a butt-ugly and more or less unusable result. Eventually I got Nouveau working at 1920x1080 and thought I was good to go. In fact, I almost was.
The one deal-breaker with Nouveau came when I clicked links in email messages (using Thunderbird) to open them in the Firefox browser. Seemingly randomly, about 3/4 or so would work, but occasionally one would lock the system solid (no response to keyboard or mouse) with a corrupted display ("white blizzard"). The only recourse was power off/power on. Google searches suggested changing a couple of settings in Firefox regarding hardware acceleration. One setting no longer exists; I toggled the other, but it did no good.
I put up with that for a day or so before deciding that, absent any cure, I would have to find a way to use the NVIDIA driver. It occurred to me that the things it was screwing up (window controls, desktop panel, menu button ...) were things under the purview of the window manager (which was Cinnamon). So I installed MATE alongside Cinnamon and switched to it. Sure enough, I got back the main menu and bottom panel, window controls and so forth. It's been stable for a few days now (with no freezes from clicking links in email messages), so I think I've confirmed my thesis that the legacy NVIDIA driver does not get along with Cinnamon, at least on my machine.
Bottom line: anyone who's getting screen freezes using an NVIDIA driver with Mint and Cinnamon might want to consider trying an alternate desktop environment.
Showing posts with label Nouveau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nouveau. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
2013 Off to a Shaky Start
Here's a bit of irony for you: I had just finished reading a blog post in which the author pooh-poohed the notion that the year 2013 would be unlucky due to the last two digits when my system crashed ... repeatedly. Maybe the triskaidekaphobics are onto something (or maybe the Mayans were just off by a week and change).
When I first installed Linux Mint 14 (Cinnamon), upgrading from Mint 11, it appeared to me that my display seemed a bit dimmer than it had been. (My monitor is a Samsung SyncMaster 932GW; the video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430.) My eyes adjusted to the difference, which I suspect was caused by the open-source Nouveau driver that ships with Mint. Until today, that's been the only issue with the Nouveau driver.
After reading the aforementioned blog post about 2013, I moved on to another post on the same blog, one containing a modest amount of graphics and nothing that, to my eye, would require any sort of hardware acceleration. As I scrolled down the post, my system suddenly did a spontaneous reboot. I think it was the X system rather than Linux itself, but I'm no expert on these things. The symptoms were a crash to a black screen, then the Mint log-in screen.
So I logged in again, and as soon as the password was submitted, I got a black screen (which is actually normal between log-in and desktop) and then the log-in screen again. Uh-oh! After logging in (again), the cycle repeated, only this time what I assume was the log-in screen was unreadable (the sort of colored "sleet" you get when there is a mismatch between monitor and display card with regard to scan frequency). I couldn't restart the X display with ctrl-alt-F1, so I powered down the computer the old fashioned way (the power switch), started it up again, and managed to log in successfully.
Poking around in the syslog file with the system log viewer (Menu > System Tools > System Log), I found the following at what I think was the point of the initial crash:
Note the reference to nouveau having a problem, followed by a fatal X error. The next chunk of the log shows the same pattern as my two log-in attempts lead to more crashes:
So I decided to switch to the proprietary NVIDIA driver. The process is easy, although the download is a bit time consuming: Menu > Preferences > Software Sources, switch to the last tab (Additional Drivers), select the NVIDIA binary driver (proprietary and tested version in my case). The system did not demand a reboot after installation was complete, but inxi -G produced output that did not specify the new driver, so I rebooted just to be safe. After the reboot, inxi -G reports "FAILED: nvidia", which is apparently a bug (it reported "FAILED: nouveau" before the driver change) but shows "GLX Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 304.43", indicating I've successfully switched to the NVIDIA driver.
We'll see if my decision to switch drivers proves rash. The Nouveau driver worked fine for months, and it's possible some other thing will blow up the NVIDIA driver.
When I first installed Linux Mint 14 (Cinnamon), upgrading from Mint 11, it appeared to me that my display seemed a bit dimmer than it had been. (My monitor is a Samsung SyncMaster 932GW; the video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430.) My eyes adjusted to the difference, which I suspect was caused by the open-source Nouveau driver that ships with Mint. Until today, that's been the only issue with the Nouveau driver.
After reading the aforementioned blog post about 2013, I moved on to another post on the same blog, one containing a modest amount of graphics and nothing that, to my eye, would require any sort of hardware acceleration. As I scrolled down the post, my system suddenly did a spontaneous reboot. I think it was the X system rather than Linux itself, but I'm no expert on these things. The symptoms were a crash to a black screen, then the Mint log-in screen.
So I logged in again, and as soon as the password was submitted, I got a black screen (which is actually normal between log-in and desktop) and then the log-in screen again. Uh-oh! After logging in (again), the cycle repeated, only this time what I assume was the log-in screen was unreadable (the sort of colored "sleet" you get when there is a mismatch between monitor and display card with regard to scan frequency). I couldn't restart the X display with ctrl-alt-F1, so I powered down the computer the old fashioned way (the power switch), started it up again, and managed to log in successfully.
Poking around in the syslog file with the system log viewer (Menu > System Tools > System Log), I found the following at what I think was the point of the initial crash:
Jan 1 17:49:20 HomePC kernel: [15178.991600] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Failed to idle channel 1. Jan 1 17:49:20 HomePC gnome-session[1620]: Gdk-WARNING: gnome-session: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.#012 Jan 1 17:49:20 HomePC mdm[1193]: WARNING: mdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Note the reference to nouveau having a problem, followed by a fatal X error. The next chunk of the log shows the same pattern as my two log-in attempts lead to more crashes:
Jan 1 17:49:21 HomePC acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jan 1 17:49:35 HomePC kernel: [15193.814381] [TTM] Failed to expire sync object before buffer eviction Jan 1 17:49:35 HomePC kernel: [15193.814443] [TTM] Failed to expire sync object before buffer eviction Jan 1 17:49:35 HomePC kernel: [15193.817930] [TTM] Failed to expire sync object before buffer eviction Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC kernel: [15209.778576] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Failed to idle channel 1. Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC kernel: [15209.782509] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Setting dpms mode 3 on vga encoder (output 0) Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC gnome-session[5894]: Gdk-WARNING: gnome-session: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.#012 Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC mdm[5858]: WARNING: mdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0 Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC pulseaudio[6317]: [pulseaudio] client-conf-x11.c: xcb_connection_has_error() returned true Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC pulseaudio[6322]: [pulseaudio] client-conf-x11.c: xcb_connection_has_error() returned true Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC pulseaudio[6325]: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting. Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC pulseaudio[6325]: [pulseaudio] bluetooth-util.c: org.bluez.Manager.ListAdapters() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Rejected send message, 2 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.111" (uid=1000 pid=6325 comm="/usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog ") interface="org.bluez.Manager" member="ListAdapters" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="org.bluez" (uid=0 pid=853 comm="/usr/sbin/bluetoothd ") Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC pulseaudio[6325]: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoServer: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-z2bkq6PwPB: Connection refused Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC pulseaudio[6325]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoServer: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-z2bkq6PwPB: Connection refused Jan 1 17:49:51 HomePC pulseaudio[6330]: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running. Jan 1 17:49:54 HomePC acpid: client 5871[0:0] has disconnected Jan 1 17:49:54 HomePC acpid: client connected from 6332[0:0] Jan 1 17:49:54 HomePC acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jan 1 17:49:54 HomePC kernel: [15213.146184] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Failed to idle channel 4. Jan 1 17:49:54 HomePC kernel: [15213.173003] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Setting dpms mode 0 on vga encoder (output 0) Jan 1 17:49:54 HomePC kernel: [15213.173011] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Output VGA-1 is running on CRTC 0 using output A Jan 1 17:50:18 HomePC kernel: [15237.313716] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Failed to idle channel 1. Jan 1 17:50:18 HomePC mdm[6318]: WARNING: mdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0 Jan 1 17:50:21 HomePC kernel: [15240.366064] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Failed to idle channel 4. Jan 1 17:50:21 HomePC acpid: client 6332[0:0] has disconnected Jan 1 17:50:21 HomePC acpid: client connected from 6745[0:0] Jan 1 17:50:21 HomePC acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jan 1 17:50:28 HomePC kernel: [15247.081273] [drm] nouveau 0000:00:0d.0: Failed to idle channel 3. Jan 1 17:50:41 HomePC kernel: Kernel logging (proc) stopped.
So I decided to switch to the proprietary NVIDIA driver. The process is easy, although the download is a bit time consuming: Menu > Preferences > Software Sources, switch to the last tab (Additional Drivers), select the NVIDIA binary driver (proprietary and tested version in my case). The system did not demand a reboot after installation was complete, but inxi -G produced output that did not specify the new driver, so I rebooted just to be safe. After the reboot, inxi -G reports "FAILED: nvidia", which is apparently a bug (it reported "FAILED: nouveau" before the driver change) but shows "GLX Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 304.43", indicating I've successfully switched to the NVIDIA driver.
We'll see if my decision to switch drivers proves rash. The Nouveau driver worked fine for months, and it's possible some other thing will blow up the NVIDIA driver.
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