Kernel Freeze with American Megatrends BIOS

[Emil Velikov]

On 30 August 2016 at 19:09, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30 August 2016 at 18:37, Roland Singer <roland.singer at desertbit.com> wrote:
>> I am running 4.7.2, but I also just tried the 4.8.0-rc4 mainline kernel.
>> The result is the same. There is no difference if bbswitch of acpi_call
>> is used. However I noticed following:
>>
>> 1. The nouveau driver is broken in both kernel version and is responsible
>>    for the freezes while gathering power state information with bbswitch.
>>    Sometimes while shutting the system down, everything except the LCD
>>    screen is switched off. This only happens with nouveau.
>>    I noticed following error log messages:
>>
> I second Ilia here. Using bbswitch in conjunction with any driver (be
> that nouveau or the proprietary one) is a bad idea.
>
>>    kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: fb: 6144 MiB GDDR5
>>    kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: priv: HUB0: 10ecc0 ffffffff (1e40822c)
>>    kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: VRAM: 6144 MiB
>>    kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: GART: 1048576 MiB
>>    kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: Pointer to TMDS table invalid
>>    kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: DCB version 4.1
>>    kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: Pointer to flat panel table invalid
>>
>> 2. -> Boot with nouveau module loaded
>>    -> switch off the discrete GPU with bbswitch or acpi_call
>>    -> start X11
>>    -> obtaining power state with bbswitch freezes the system
>>    -> or working with the system for some minutes freezes the system
>>
> (If Ilia's suggestions does not help) Confirm if the freeze is due
> to/as the GPU is powered on or off.
>
>> 3. -> Boot with nouveau module blacklisted
>>    -> switch off the discrete GPU
>>    -> start X11
>>    -> system immediately freezes
>>
> It's perfectly possible that the discrete GPU is set as boot one and X
> goes angry since there's no driver/way to bring it up.
>
>> 4. -> Boot with nouveau module blacklisted
>>    -> switch off the discrete GPU
>>    -> start Wayland
>>    -> system runs - Note: I tried this for couple of days with 4.6 and 4.7 mainline
>>                           and the system freezed randomly after some time.
>>                           However I have to test if this is still present with 4.7.2
>>                           and 4.8 mainline. Right now it seams to be fine.
>>    -> running Xwayland (does not depend on the GPU power state) kills performance!
>>       the system freezes for several seconds...
>>       So working with Wayland is also no solution.
>>
>> My conclusion:
>>
>> 1. Nouveau has couple of problems with GTX 9** M Nvidia GPUs.
>>    I would love to help here.
>>
>> 2. X11 is just broken and is not capable to start the graphical session
>>    if the nvidia GPU is not handled by any video driver (kernel module).
>>    Even forcing X11 to ignore the discrete GPU doesn't help.
>>
> Out of curiosity: how did you force X to ignore the device ?
>
>>    Setting the command line arguments to:
>>
>>      acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"
>>
>>    fixes the issues with X11 but other things break...
>>    What the hell is going on?! :/
>>
> You can check if it's the boot_vga assumption with
>
[Sorry about that] ...
cat /sys/class/drm/card*/device/{boot_vga,vendor}

If the output changes them my assumption holds true.
-Emil