[Nouveau] Blank screen at startup (conflict with VESA VGA)

[Didier Spaier]

Hi all,

new to this list ;)

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. lspci|grep VGA says:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1)

I have Slacware64-13.0 and Slackware64-current installed.

Nouveau is modularized in all my kernels for -current.

A problem arise even if I don't want to use nouveau under X: unless nouveau be blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf at startup,
- when using one of the VESA modes at startup after a while screen goes blank and I get a warning in syslog e.g:
   Apr  2 18:58:56 darkstar kernel: fb: conflicting fb hw usage nouveaufb vs VESA VGA - removing generic driver,
- no problem when using a VGA mode (text only),

this disregarding which X driver I use afterwards (I always start in console mode).

But according to this page:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting
I thought nouveaufb shouldn't conflict with vesafb ? Am I wrong ?

I tried with modules shipped in vanilla 2.6.33.1 as well as the last Nouveau kernel repository pulled from git: no luck in both cases.

I know there are easy workarounds: either use "VGA=ask", "VGA=ext" or "VGA=normal" as a lilo.conf option or blacklist nouveau -- which doesn't hurt anyway as nouveau will be loaded at X startup anyhow.

But this is still is an annoyance for newcomers as when they are trapped all they can do if they have a VESA mode in lilo.conf is launch another system or live CD/DVD and either edit lilo.conf and run lilo again or edit blacklist.conf to blacklist nouveau.

But still, before kindly requesting Patrick Volkerding to blacklist nouveau in -current for the time being, I wanted to now of another way to go if possible.

Thanks in advance for your answers,

Didier