Subject: Bug#683363: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: basically freezes when using some 3D apps (Neverball, etracer) on GeForce 7300 GS (EQ overflowing, mouse may still move)

From: Sven Joachim <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 20:31:38 +0200

On 2012-07-31 02:21 +0200, Filipus Klutiero wrote:

> On this system, using a GeForce 7300 GS, nouveau works for general
> display, but has a big problem with 3D acceleration.

Yes, the 3D driver in Mesa 8.0 and earlier for this card is known to
have problems, and it's unsupported upstream.  See also
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40406 for a similar case
with the same card.

> I noticed this
> when starting Neverball. It froze about 2 seconds after starting. The
> cursor would then keep moving, but nothing else would
> happen. Switching to a tty won't work. I reproduced this at
> will. Apparently, the freeze always happens at a specific point. In
> Neverball, the welcome screen uses 3D acceleration, so there is no
> need to do anything to provoke the crash.

Does it get any better if you disable AIGLX in xorg.conf or downgrade
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau to the version in testing?

> I tested the nvidia driver on the same machine and I don't get the
> same issue.

If you're serious about 3D, the blob is the least of the evils, at least
until Mesa 8.1 is released

> I am able to SSH into the machine when it's frozen and the console
> works fine. I can kill X and restart the display manager, but I
> couldn't recover (the screen gets garbled).

See http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/LockupRecovery for possibilities
to recover from the GPU lockup.

> X logs backtrace and reports EQ overflowing. As I write these lines, I
> realize the highly abnormal X log files on the system. This probably
> comes from an nvidia driver-related bug. gdm would not start nor fail
> to start before I configured X to use the nvidia driver.

Actually, this is a gdm3 bug.

Cheers,
       Sven