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

[Rob Clark]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 8:57 AM, Ilia Mirkin <imirkin at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 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.

well, I don't actually have any ARM board w/ PCIe yet.. although I
would expect that drm_cflush* being no-ops on arm/arm64 isn't likely
to help things.

BR,
-R

> 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