[Nouveau] Problems getting nouveau to work with either Geforce GT710 or Geforce 9800GT on ARM Cortex-A9

[Ben Skeggs]

On 24 January 2018 at 06:19, Luís Mendes <luis.p.mendes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Arnd,
>
> Sorry for sending this email directly to you, but maybe you can help
> me, or guide me where to look for.
>
> I am having big trouble getting the nouveau driver to work with either
> Geforce GT 710 or Geforce 9800 GT on an ARM armv7l Cortex-A9 with PCIe
> x1/x4 with linux kernel 4.15-rc.
>
> The Geforce GT 710 hangs the kernel boot process for a while and then
> a kernel oops occurs, due to nvidiafb, when initializing CRTC. It also
> generates messages "division by zero in kernel".
You definitely want to disable nvidiafb somehow, it's ancient,
unmaintained, and has zero chance of working on this hardware.  I'm
not even entirely sure how/why it thinks it can work on this hardware,
but just disable it.

>
> The nouveau module generates a gpu lockup with Geforce 9800GT, DMA
> transfers seem to fail, but sometimes is possible to start lightdm and
> enter the login screen with an all black screen with just the mouse
> cursor visible.
>
> I've also tried AMD RX460 and Radeon R7 240 graphics cards on the same
> hardware with the same Linux kernel and I am able to enter Ubuntu Mate
> 17.10 Desktop and run glmark and other applications, so I am sure the
> hardware is capable of working with NVIDIA cards too, but the nouveau
> module somehow doesn't cope well with the armv7l architecture, maybe
> lock handling, irqs, dma fences, I don't know for sure.
I'm not entirely sure what else is going on here.  Is that
architecture big/little-endian?  We very likely have some issues on
big-endian particularly with newer hardware, where the endian controls
have either moved or disappeared.

The driver supposedly works on Tegra ARM architectures with PCIE
devices, so hopefully there's not too much to do here to get it
working for you.

Ben.

>
> I am a software and hardware engineer using Linux on a daily basis for
> quite some time now, so that I am able to provide more details, try
> patches, or make changes to kernel source to try to fix this, but I
> would need some insight where to look for. Maybe you can help or
> redirect me to someone who can help me...
>
> I've attached the kernel logs from both graphics cards issues.
>
> Regards,
> Luís Mendes
>
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