Weird 'nouveau' issues.....
Posted: Sat 14 Mar 2020, 14:17
Afternoon, guys'n'gals.
Having never used a discrete GPU until very recently, I can't really say whether all the following is 'par for the course', or not.
Currently, the kennels contains:-
Bionicpup64 8.0
Xenialpup64 7.5
Tahrpup64 6.0.6 (efi), &
radky's sublime DPup 'Stretch' 7.5
Until I bought the GeForce GT710 the other day, I'd been using the Pentium G5400's 'on-die' UHD 630 GPU.....no issues in any of the Pups.
All the Pups are running bog-standard, with the exception of Tahr64; due to the age of the kernel, and this new HP's hardware being fairly new, Tahr's 3-series kernel wouldn't recognise the audio card, so.....no sound. I got round that by performing a kernel swap, and Tahr64 is now happy with Xenial's 4.9.58 kernel. Sound works again (yay!)
Now; current issues:-
------------------------------------
Running with the GeForce card:-
Bionicpup64
Bionic64 functions fine, with the sole exception, apparently, of DNS resolution. At every boot, I don't get the normal, assigned address on the LAN....I'm getting a strange, 'external' IP address, with the resultant messages in all browsers of having no internet connection. The only workaround I've discovered so far is to disconnect, re-boot the router, then after it's settled down, it'll re-connect correctly. DNS/DHCP then behaves itself like nothing happened....
It gets distinctly annoying to have to do this every single time, because it'll also pull this stunt if I need to restart 'X' for any reason......to my mind, this all points to a problem of some kind with the way the nouveau driver in Bionic64's default kernel is communicating with the 'X' server, etc.
Xenialpu64
Touch wood.....no issues of ANY kind. Yet.
Tahrpup64
Now, this is where it gets weird.....yet, not entirely unexpected. 606's late 3-series kernel (k3.14.79) is obviously not as developed as later 4- and 5-series ones (in other words, not such a usable version of 'nouveau'), and Tahr itself is using distinctly older versions of Mesa3D, OpenGL, Xorg, etc, etc. I would estimate that the underlying infra-structure in Tahr is simply too old to support the GeForce's requirements, because it boots up, and comes to desktop, quite happily.....yet after a few seconds, it literally freezes solid. Nothing - and I mean, nothing; I've tried every trick, and then some - will get things functioning again, and the only answer is a hard power-off.
Remove the GeForce, and use the Pentium's 'on-die' UHD 630 GPU, and Tahr runs as sweet as a nut.
(And before anybody says it, no; I don't wish to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers. It's bad enough trying to get the damn thing working in one Puppy; trying to pull the same stunt in multiple Pups, where each & every single version has to be specifically compiled for the kernel in use.....aughh!! I don't think so....)
Mainly, I'm curious as to whether anyone else has had similar sorts of problems with the 'nouveau' driver & Nvidia cards.
Comments?
Mike.
Having never used a discrete GPU until very recently, I can't really say whether all the following is 'par for the course', or not.
Currently, the kennels contains:-
Bionicpup64 8.0
Xenialpup64 7.5
Tahrpup64 6.0.6 (efi), &
radky's sublime DPup 'Stretch' 7.5
Until I bought the GeForce GT710 the other day, I'd been using the Pentium G5400's 'on-die' UHD 630 GPU.....no issues in any of the Pups.
All the Pups are running bog-standard, with the exception of Tahr64; due to the age of the kernel, and this new HP's hardware being fairly new, Tahr's 3-series kernel wouldn't recognise the audio card, so.....no sound. I got round that by performing a kernel swap, and Tahr64 is now happy with Xenial's 4.9.58 kernel. Sound works again (yay!)
Now; current issues:-
------------------------------------
Running with the GeForce card:-
Bionicpup64
Bionic64 functions fine, with the sole exception, apparently, of DNS resolution. At every boot, I don't get the normal, assigned address on the LAN....I'm getting a strange, 'external' IP address, with the resultant messages in all browsers of having no internet connection. The only workaround I've discovered so far is to disconnect, re-boot the router, then after it's settled down, it'll re-connect correctly. DNS/DHCP then behaves itself like nothing happened....
It gets distinctly annoying to have to do this every single time, because it'll also pull this stunt if I need to restart 'X' for any reason......to my mind, this all points to a problem of some kind with the way the nouveau driver in Bionic64's default kernel is communicating with the 'X' server, etc.
Xenialpu64
Touch wood.....no issues of ANY kind. Yet.
Tahrpup64
Now, this is where it gets weird.....yet, not entirely unexpected. 606's late 3-series kernel (k3.14.79) is obviously not as developed as later 4- and 5-series ones (in other words, not such a usable version of 'nouveau'), and Tahr itself is using distinctly older versions of Mesa3D, OpenGL, Xorg, etc, etc. I would estimate that the underlying infra-structure in Tahr is simply too old to support the GeForce's requirements, because it boots up, and comes to desktop, quite happily.....yet after a few seconds, it literally freezes solid. Nothing - and I mean, nothing; I've tried every trick, and then some - will get things functioning again, and the only answer is a hard power-off.
Remove the GeForce, and use the Pentium's 'on-die' UHD 630 GPU, and Tahr runs as sweet as a nut.
(And before anybody says it, no; I don't wish to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers. It's bad enough trying to get the damn thing working in one Puppy; trying to pull the same stunt in multiple Pups, where each & every single version has to be specifically compiled for the kernel in use.....aughh!! I don't think so....)
Mainly, I'm curious as to whether anyone else has had similar sorts of problems with the 'nouveau' driver & Nvidia cards.
Comments?
Mike.