Hi Steve, While the NVIDIA driver often happens to work with consoles other than the standard VGA text mode console without any user-visible symptoms, any console configuration besides VGA text mode is not supported by the driver, and use of any alternative consoles is directly linked, in many cases, to stability problems and graphical corruption.
Here are some recent examples of issues users have encountered as a result of using framebuffer consoles with the NVIDIA driver; these symptoms were observed with a framebuffer console present, and absent when using a VGA text mode console on the same system: - Complete graphics freeze in some situations - recoverable by restarting X. - Inability to restore console after suspend/resume. - Scribbling of data from the console on top of the X screen driven by the primary GPU. Users shouldn't be exposed to such issues in the name of graphical boot splashes. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to nvidia-graphics-drivers in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1057093 Title: Installing nvidia-current should blacklist gfxpayload Status in “nvidia-graphics-drivers” package in Ubuntu: Triaged Bug description: The NVIDIA driver does not interact well with consoles other than plain VGA text consoles, such as vesafb. NVIDIA recommends that users run VGA text consoles in conjunction with the NVIDIA driver. Many distributions, such as Ubuntu, enable a framebuffer console by default. It appears that Ubuntu has a mechanism (via update-grub- gfxpayload) to blacklist the framebuffer console for specific hardware. It appears that the nvidia-current package includes a gfxpayload rules file, which includes a (commented out) example rule to blacklist the framebuffer console for all NVIDIA devices. I confirmed that after installing the nvidia-current package and rebooting, the system was using a vesafb framebuffer console. I edited /usr/share/nvidia-current/nvidia-current.grub-gfxpayload and uncommented the example rule, ran update-grub-gfxpayload, rebooted, and confirmed that the system was using a VGA text console. This rule should be enabled by default as part of installing the nvidia-current package. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/1057093/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
