On Sat, 03 Jun 2017 15:12:15 -0700 Paul Rogers <[email protected]> wrote:
> Errm, but this seems strictly related to trying to use the Nouveau > driver. It has been reliable with the VESA-fb driver. The Nouveau might be more RAM intensive, also it might pull more power which could trigger hardware issues. It is easy enough to slow the RAM speed down and see if it helps any. I recommend checking RAM speed issues for any mysterious kernel panics. > However, this CPU is a "Bloomfield" i7-940, the first generation > socket 1366 processors. Not the CPU, I was asking about microcode updates for the video card (GPU). Some video cards require the kernel to load microcode for modesetting to work. See "Firmware for Nvidia video chips" at the LFS page: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/firmware.html Let's see all of your kernel's video driver log lines from dmesg | less The first lines should involve "agpgart: Detected ..." (if you are using an AGP interface card) "[drm] Initialized", "[drm] ... kernel modesetting enabled." If firmware is loaded it will say something like "[drm] Loading .... Microcode" the last lines will be something like " [drm] Initialized ... on minor ..." Does anyone know if his Nvidia GTS 450 card needs firmware? > Actually, I really don't mind using the VESA driver on this box. You can always fall back on that, but I would try to find out what is going wrong. Doing so might fix a problem that might bite in another way in the future. I would even try the Nvidia proprietary driver before I would give up on the card. BTW, if you ever want to try another card, I've had good results with the XFX Radeon R7-360P-2SF5: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150753 (Well so far, but I haven't yet got around to upgrading to the latest BLFS, and I haven't tried the amdgpu driver with it either, just radeon.) Also, this card does require the supplemental 6 pin power supply connector. The R7-360P is a "Bonaire" card. Gentoo has some info on these newer Radeon cards: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU FWIW, for the radeon cards, we can get kernel firmware at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git I just copy the whole radeon directory to /lib/firmware/radeon and then in the kernel config, I do: CONFIG_PREVENT_FIRMWARE_BUILD=y CONFIG_FW_LOADER=y CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL=y CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="radeon/bonaire_ce.bin radeon/bonaire_k_smc.bin radeon/bonaire_mc.bin radeon/bonaire_me.bin radeon/bonaire_mec.bin radeon/bonaire_pfp.bin radeon/bonaire_rlc.bin radeon/bonaire_sdma.bin radeon/bonaire_uvd.bin radeon/BONAIRE_vce.bin" CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib/firmware" # CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER_FALLBACK is not set In this way, during a kernel build the needed firmware is obtained in the /lib/firmware directory and compiled into the kernel. However, note from the LFS link above, for Nvidia cards, you will have to extract the firmware yourself using a python script. After that, the kernel procedure above should work (adjusting paths and filenames as needed). Cheers, Mike -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
