Bug 79522

Summary:	[NV67] Possible Regression 3.14.4+
Product:	xorg	Reporter:	Mike <storkus>
Component:	Driver/nouveau	Assignee:	Nouveau Project <nouveau>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	Keywords:	regression
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86-64 (AMD64)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Mike 2014-06-02 03:18:13 UTC

Note: this may be related to Bug#70972.

My Acer Aspire 5520-5092 with a GeForce 7000M/nForce 610M MCP-67 running Slackware 14.1 was working fine until I updated to kernel 3.14.4.  I had previously upgraded to 3.14.3 and nothing happened then.  Upgrading again today to 3.14.5 did not fix the problem, although it behaves slightly differently.

The problem is that, during boot, upon KMS loading and the framebuffer starting up, the laptop backlight does not turn on most of the time; part of the time when it does, I still have a blank screen.  Sometimes the machine seems to have booted up, but most of the time it appears locked, yet without a blinking LED.  This has all the hallmarks of a race as rebooting enough times gives a working system.  I haven't yet tried using an external monitor.

The only other update the Slackware has done since this started is messing with LibELF--still 0.8.13, but with new compile options.  This was done simultaneously with the kernel updates.  I don't see how this could affect the kernel prior to mounting anything, though.

Thanks for any help, and a needed project!  Mike

Comment 1 Ilia Mirkin 2014-06-02 03:28:23 UTC

Do I understand correctly that v3.14.3 works but v3.14.4 doesn't? If so, that's rather odd, since no drm changes went in between those two versions. If not, can you be more explicit about what the last working version was? You might need to do a bisect. Another thing to try is to turn off MSI (boot with nouveau.config=NvMSI=0).

Comment 2 Mike 2014-07-28 08:54:48 UTC

Update: my laptop's display totally died yesterday--no backlight OR anything displayed in reflected light.  Booting in Vista (which I had saved on the old hard driver that came with it when I replaced it with an SSD) didn't change anything.  Vista showed no monitor present other than the external one I had connected, which it read as PnP generic.

One oddity: both Vista and the BIOS Int13 displayed on an external SVGA monitor just fine, yet Slackware 14.1 updated to 3.14.12(?) would not--yet some Nouveau versions, including 3.10.17 that came stock when Slackware 14.1 came out, did just fine as I was using Nouveau at a couple of LUG meetings talking to a projector.

Anyway, at this point I think its near-impossible to state whether Nouveau screwed with something in BIOS it should have, or this was an intermittent hardware failure that coincidentally started when I upgraded to kernel 3.14 (stranger things have happened), or what, but at 7 years old, I've been thinking for a while of replacing this laptop--guess I have a good reason now.

Marking this resolved-invalid unless any of you can think of a reason why not.

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