NV18 GPU lockup with Nouveau

I just ran xorg-edgers' ppa-purge and tried the card again. I have enabled compositing in Metacity. One test was selecting the Applications menu and rapidly switching through that and Places and System, which eventually froze X. After doing Alt-SysRq-K, it allowed me to log back in, and I tried again with no problem; I opened some semi-transparent terminals, enlarged them, and moved them around over eachother. Trying to enlarge the ~eighth terminal froze X. Eventually I had a kernel panic. Occasionally I can't even boot fully. Sometimes X will freeze and allow cursor movement, other times won't. Has occured a couple times in a (Ctrl-Alt-F1...) virtual terminal.

Often I see colorful flashing as textures load, particularly at boot. Once I rebooted and seen the screen as it was when X froze, for a few seconds, and it cleared and finished loading GNOME.

I suppose there is a chance the card is defective...but it has no problem with the NVIDIA binary drivers. (As an aside, I even had Compiz running in Nouveau for some durations before freezing.)

I may try booting an Live session soon to see if it happens there too.

To clarify, the one-reboot persistent freeze image I mentioned was with Compiz under xorg-edgers packages.

One other odd occurrence was terminal text partially overlayed on GNOME.

I've forwarded this upstream to the Nouveau developers. It would be helpful if you could subscribe to https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27153 as the developers may wish to ask for more information from you.

I believe I may be seeing the same symptom on a Sony Vaio VGN-FE41Z that contains an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 (NV40) [Xorg: "Chipset: "NVIDIA NV4b"].

In this case though, it is hard to determine what precisely is causing it.

The symptom is that the plymouth splash screen remains with the "Press C to cancel checking disks" message, some disk activity is evident from occasional LED flashes, but the system doesn't respond to VT switch key-presses (Alt-F1 to Alt-F7) or any other key sequence. It responds to Alt+SysReq with S (sync disks), B (boot) but I didn't see any signs that K (Kill processes on tty) did anything useful - although it is possible that it had invisibly switched from tty7 without changing the display.

Examining the Lucid log files from the regular Karmic environment I couldn't see anything obvious in terms of errors, but I did notice that /var/log/Xorg.0.log had been written to but didn't seem to be complete.

At the time I looked I wasn't sure what the final entries in that log-file would usually be, but having managed a successful start it appears that Xorg gets 'stuck' after nouveau has started whilst additional modules are being loaded - I'll do another test to get a fresh log now I know what to look for.

In this case I found a workaround was to unplug the external DVI-D monitor from the docking station (the internal LVDS output was mirrored on the external DVI-D), so not sure if this bug is 'the one' on that basis.

It appears I can reproduce this bug with the NV40. Starting Lucid with the external DVI-D connected and plymouth output mirrored it 'stops' with the plymouth splash screen as described previously.

Using Alt+SysReq+K to kill the processes on the current terminal (tty7 at this point) disk activity increases and Xorg restarts and presents the GDM greeter/log-in screen from where things progress.

I've not yet seen any similar freeze after logging in, but maybe DJR013 can suggest an application/action that is almost guaranteed to produce one so I can test?

After more research I found bug #533135 "System fails to boot with plymouth installed (nouveau driver with >1 display)" which seems to more accurately fit the symptoms I'm experiencing.

This is fixed at least in natty, according to upstream.