Bug 21124

Strange, I have a non-TC NV44 and all my fonts look fine. I'm assuming you had no problems previously and a recent update caused this, or is this the first time you've tried Nouveau?

Does your kernel log have any errors?

I'd like to point out that gentoo ships a heavily patches version of xorg-server, 41 patches that affect exa. It's possible a mistake was made in the backporting somewhere. I'm not saying it is the issue, just consider it when searching for the answer.

(In reply to comment #1)
> or is this the first time you've tried Nouveau?
Yes.

> Does your kernel log have any errors?
None.

Maybe you can build the server from the git overlay to see if it's a Gentoo patch causing it? If it's not an issue with Gentoo's xserver it might be an issue with TurboCache variants in the driver.

Just to let you know that I saw chipped letters too when using the nouveau driver with my Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 and using:

Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty)
kernel 2.6.28
xserver-xorg-core (2:1.6.0-0ubuntu14)
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (1:0.0.10~git+20090404+11be9a9-0ubuntu1)
nouveau-kernel-source (0.0.11+git20090404-0ubuntu1)
libdrm-nouveau1 (2.4.5-0ubuntu4)

Created attachment 27508 [details]
Changes with different sub-pixel rendering and hinting style settings

I have the exact same problem on Fedora 11 (just upgraded from Fedora 10).

Hardware:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7100 GS (rev a1)

Fedora's version string:
0.0.12-40.20090528git0c17b87.fc11

It changed when I played around with KDE's "sub-pixel rendering" and "hinting style" settings, see for yourself in the attached PNG.

I can't see the problem anymore if I am using the latest Git packages from Ubuntu's "xorg-edgers" packages. These package have the following X server version code:

xorg-server 2:1.8.1.901+git20100602+server-1.8-branch.b65c5be1-0ubuntu0sarvatt4~lucid

Current video hardware:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G72 [GeForce 7300 SE/7200 GS] (rev a1)

(In reply to comment #6)

> It changed when I played around with KDE's "sub-pixel rendering" and "hinting
> style" settings, see for yourself in the attached PNG.

Thank you very much, Patrick! I now had similar problems with damaged fonts (most often in letters like "l", "i", or symbols like ":" and "." for about half a year!

Changing the sub-pixel rendering settings in KDE (System Settings/ Application Appearance/ fonts/) made fonts on my system look great again! I had to chose "deactivated" (looks ugly) or "activated" instead of the preset "system default".

The problems often only occurred after I had started a few applications and used them for some time. I tried different operating systems (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu) with different versions of nouveau. With the "nv" driver I newer had such problems. I'm so glad this seems fixed for me now!

It appears that this bug report has laid dormant for quite a while. Sorry we haven't gotten to it. Since we fix bugs all the time, chances are pretty good that your issue has been fixed with the latest software. Please give it a shot. (Linux kernel 3.10.7, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.9, mesa 9.1.6, or their git versions.) If upgrading to the latest isn't an option for you, your distro's bugzilla is probably the right destination for your bug report.

In an effort to clean up our bug list, we're pre-emptively closing all bugs that haven't seen updates since 2011. If the original issue remains, please make sure to provide fresh info, see http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Bugs/ for what we need to see, and re-open this one.

Thanks,

The Nouveau Team