[Nouveau] Hard-to-find bug brings down whole kernel

[Ognjen Galić]

I have an older Lenovo machine, a T61, with the Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M.
There is this random bug that would hang the whole machine, and then 
cause a
panic and reboot it (the caps lock light is flashing).

I can't get any kernel messages of this issue except the one in this 
YouTube video I had luck to
film and catch the error:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1X6s7_laGw

The bug can be triggered always by visiting 
https://www.google.com/chrome when
the animation plays of the Chrome window rotating.

This has been a persistent bug for me from 3.1X all the way to 4.8.12, 
and I've solved
it before by just using the proprietary driver, but I now have trouble 
resuming Linux with that.

I've tried logging the kernel messages over SSH and that did not work 
either, it just locks up.

Anyone has any ideas how to catch the issue without going through the 
whole kdump procedure?

Regards,

     Gala