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

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 8:47 AM, Luís Mendes <luis.p.mendes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry for alI these individual emails, but I think is more readable
> this way, by having each independent information in a separate email.
>
> I also have these additional cards that I can try: Gefoce GT 1030 and
> Geforce GTX 1050 Ti.
>
> I have tried Geforce GT 1030 and it is working nicely but without
> hardware acceleration. Without the hardware acceleration I am able to
> get into X (Ubuntu Mate 17.10) and run glmark2.
> dmesg follows in attachment.

This is a GP108 for which you need not-yet-upstream code to get acceleration.

>
> I believe this indicates there is no issue with cards initialization,
> but is rather something to do with the hardware acceleration code.

Someone associated with (or working at?) RH was investigating this for
some server-type ARM board with PCIe slots. (Was it you? Rob Clark,
CC'd, will remember who it was, and may be able to point you in an
appropriate direction.) I think that there were various odd issues
with coherency which remained only lightly diagnosed. Note that all
your boots instantaneously print "GPU lockup, have a nice day".
Everything after that is largely irrelevant.

This happens when it tries to execute some very basic things and sees
that there is no progress. This means sticking a command buffer on the
DMA ring, letting the GPU execute it, and making sure that the fence
is hit as seen by the CPU. I would recommend tracking down why the
accel doesn't work (i.e. you get that message), and not worry about
little details like "image appears on screen".

Unfortunately the initialization logic in nouveau is a giant pile of
spaghetti (with various arguably good reasons, but it doesn't change
the end result), so tracking down exactly what fails in the GPU init
will be a bit of an undertaking. You should join #nouveau on
irc.freenode.net and get some additional advice there.

Good luck,

  -ilia