[Nouveau] still seeking way to recover card after cursor disappears or card locks up

[Ben Skeggs]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 08:55:49PM -0700, Robert M. Riches Jr. wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 13:24:55 +0200
> > From: Arvydas Sidorenko <asido4 at gmail.com>
> > To: "Robert M. Riches Jr." <rm.riches at jacob21819.net>
> > Cc: nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> >
> > On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Robert M. Riches Jr.
> > <rm.riches at jacob21819.net> wrote:
> > > Is it considered safe to rmmod nouveau and then modprobe it back
> > > again? ?I have a diskless system with a different card I could try
> > > that with to gain confidence if the list says it's safe to do that.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Robert Riches
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Nouveau mailing list
> > > Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> > > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau
> >
> > I very doubt that rmmod and modprobe will help you in any way since
> > nouveau is KMS module and it stays in use the whole time. Something
> > will be broken anyway. But you can try and see what's happening, it
> > will not brick your card.
> 
> Arvydas, thank you very much for that info/advice.  You were
> 100% right that rmmod refused to remove the nouveau module.
> 
> Is there any other way to force a reset of a graphics card or
> driver module other than OS shutdown/reboot?

# echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind; modprobe -r nouveau

That should allow you to unload.  Depending on the card, you won't have
a display after this (pre-GeForce8 should restore VGA mode) and will
have to reload the module blindly.

Ben.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Robert Riches
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> Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau