Hello, all,
(Please cc me when replying, I'm not subscribed to the mailing list)
I have (according do lspci) a NVIDIA Corporation GK208B [GeForce GT 710]
(rev a1) graphics card. The correct proprietary driver for this card
seems to be the Nvidia 390 series.
When Bookworm came out, I was running Bullseye with this driver and
never really had any graphical issues that I can remember. Upon
upgrading to Bullseye, I eventually found out this driver was no longer
available and I was stuck with nouveau. I was recommended the tesla 470
driver during the upgrade, but I never got it to work.
The nouveau driver would be fine, since I don't do anything
graphics-intensive like gaming and I get the bonus of being able to run
Wayland, which is cool. Except that I started noticing constant freezes
for no apparent reason. They usually take a few hours to happen,
sometimes I can spend a day or maybe two without freezes, but they _keep
happening_. I'm gonna spare you of the details of the effort I spent
trying to investigate this problem, but what I found out is:
* It happens in any of the kernels I have installed: 6.1, 6.0, 5.11, 4.9
* It happens in Plasma, and it doesn't matter if I'm running X11 or
Wayland
* It _seems_ not to happen under GNOME Wayland, but I think it happens
under GNOME X11
* It appears to be related with screen sharing, because:
o When I was using Plasma, I had the impression that the graphics
froze way more often when I was sharing my screen
o Screen sharing doesn't work on GNOME Wayland (maybe related to
why it didn't freeze yet)
o The one time where I tried to use GNOME X11, it froze
immediately after I tried to share my screen
* The kernel logs seem to indicate some missing firmware right before
the graphics card freezes (and indeed some firmware is missing)
Screen sharing is essential for me to work, so this is really not a
great situation to be in. For comparison, my laptop, which was also
updated to Bookworm in the same day I updated this PC, had none of the
problems I'm describing here, since it has an integrated intel graphics
card.
I appreciate that Nvidia cards can be very problematic and that the one
card I own is really old, but I didn't have this problem until updating
and I know this card can work just fine with the right driver.
Unfortunately, right now, nouveau is not adequate for me to work, but
the driver that does work is not officially available. What should I do?
* Should I try updating to a newer kernel to see if nouveau got fixed?
* What it I try installing the 390 driver from Bullseye in my Bookworm
installation? Would that cause any problems?
* Should I try installing the missing firmware?
* Any other ideas?
Thank you for the help!
