nouveau: System crashes with NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT

[James]

On 2019-08-18 11:27 a.m., Ondrej Zary wrote:
> On Saturday 17 August 2019 14:50:33 Alex Dewar wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm getting frequent system crashes (every few hours or so) and it seems
>> that the nouveau driver is causing the issue (dmesg output below). I see it
>> with both v5.2.8 and the v4.19 LTS kernel. Sometimes the system
>> completely freezes and sometimes seemingly just the nouveau driver goes
>> down. The screen freezes and colours stream across it. Often after I
>> reboot the BIOS logo is mangled too until the first modeset. The crash
>> seems to be happening in nv50_fb_intr() in nv50.c.
>>
>> I'm not sure if this is related, but the system now often freezes on
>> suspend or resume since I switched from using the old (recently
>> abandoned) proprietry NVIDIA drivers, again both with 5.2 and 4.19
>> kernels. Blacklisting the nouveau driver doesn't seem to fix it however,
>> though I guess the graphics card could still be causing issues in some
>> other way? I never had problems with suspend and resume before.
>>
>> Any suggestions about how I could debug this further?
> 
> Is it really a software problem (does it still work fine with proprietary
> driver)?
> These nVidia chips are known to fail and corrupt BIOS logo suggests that.
> 

It's interesting the proprietary driver still seems to have support for 
series 6 and series 7 (just series 8 became unsupported).

I would try a live iso with a recent kernel.