[Nouveau] nouveau crashes on startup

[Chriss Kalogeropoulos]

hi everybody,

i have a problem with the latest kernel and nouveau driver and i would
appreciate any assistance.

My setup is an 24'' core duo 2 iMac,4 gb ram and an nvidia 7600 card.
I use the 10.10 ubuntu (64 bit). Nouveau was working amazingly well with
all the latest ubuntu versions even after enabling experimental 3d.

A few months ago i managed to fry the card  (probably by running some
benchmark for cairo-perf). This happened during the 10.04 ubuntu
version. After the first reboot, i got garbage on the screen and i
though that the card should be replaced. 

To my surprise, the system managed to start with the following message :
"nouveau gpu lockup, switching to software fbcon". After that i had no
problems using the software accelerated driver and i also had some
opengl acceleration.

With 2.6.36 and 2.6.37 drivers, the system cannot fall back to the fbcon
but displays garbage and freezes before X can display anything. 

Is  there anything i can do to go back to the old behavior with the
latest kernels ? is there any kind of log or info to post that might
help resolve the issue ? 

please cc me since i am not on the list

Thanks in advance