Created attachment 97126 [details] dmesg from boot to just after login Previously I was using Fedora 17 and found that once a week or so I would get nouveau errors and had to reboot. Recently I installed Fedora 20 (always clean installs) and for the first few weeks all was good so I thought the problem had been resolved. Alas the problem remains, although slightly different, and has slowly deteriorated to the point that now it presents at login. As suggested on your site I initially lodged a bug with redhat, but that seems to have stalled: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708422 My workaround is to use vncserver and my notebook to remote into F20. The virtual consoles on F20 are fine, and the UI also working, the problem is (excuse the windows terminology) the client area of application windows is rendered as white. As an example I can start terminal from my favourites bar, the client area displays as white, I can type "exit", it is not reflected in terminal, hit enter and the window will close Same white windows in gnote, settings, nautilus, etc Are there any special configs I can try? I am happy to provide more info, do more tests and compile nouveau myself if it would help... just need some guidance. Thanks, Troy
Well, the errors are coming from blit commands (blit = copy image). So it makes sense that you'd be seeing white or otherwise uninitialized screen areas. This code hasn't exactly changed of late. It might even be a hw error of some sort. I don't think others with NV4B chips are seeing this. And it's an unknown error on top of that (that's the "unknown bits" part of it... normally it'd say exactly what it was complaining about). You can disable acceleration by adding NoAccel to the xorg config, or by booting with nouveau.noaccel=1. Unless you're able to identify a change of some sort that makes it go from non-working to working (other than killing acceleration entirely), I'm not sure that we'll be able to do much. I'm talking about kernel versions, ddx versions, that sort of thing.
Thank-you Ilia! On Fedora 20 I have created a minimalist config containing only: Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "nouveau" Option "NoAccel" "true" EndSection ... and am now able to login and work normally, although understandably graphics are slower (but better than remote desktop). You mention the issue may be related to a hardware error. Is this (ie "working" when hw acceleration disabled) conclusive proof, or is there some other test I can do to confirm this? Like memtest for the GPU?
Well it took a while but I eventually discovered Video Memory Test (VMT) which is like memtest but for video ram. I downloaded the ISO version (VMTCE) from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmtce/files/ After completing the test there were 223,834 errors. Nice... not. Further investigation suggests nVidia might have switched the type of solder the year after my card was manufactured, due to high failure rates in notebooks: http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/39045-nvidia-gpu-failures-caused-by-material-problem-sources-claim Anyway, my problem is indeed a hardware error, most likely all those solder joints have micro fractures. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
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