nouveau timeout and system lockup

[Ivan Larionov]

After upgrading from 20.04 to 20.10 system is unusable anymore due to GPU issues with nouveau. Same system worked fine on 20.04.

Switching to nvidia proprietary driver and Xorg fixes the issue.

Symptoms:

System starts just fine, but overall UI performance is bad, everything seems slow and CPU usage seems too high even when idle. After a while UI freezes completly. Sometimes it recovers after several minutes, other times it doesn't and system freezes forever, requiring hard reboot.

Setup: Ubuntu 20.10. nouveau. Wayland. nVidia GTX 1080 Ti. Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3.

dmesg output attached.

[Ivan Larionov (xeron-oskom)]

Tried 5.9.1 mainline kernel and got the same issue. The only difference is Wayland recovered much faster (under 1 min). I didn't wait after recovery to see if system will lockup completely and rebooted with proprietary driver. Attaching dmesg output.

[Ivan Larionov (xeron-oskom)]

Turns out high CPU Usage and slow UI issue is unrelated, it was due to CPU governor reset to powersave and always using min frequency.

But the issue with nouveau timeout and system lockup still stays I guess. Unless it was triggered by low CPU frequency.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Ivan Larionov (xeron-oskom)]

This is fixed in 21.04.

[Ivan Larionov (xeron-oskom)]

I spoke too soon. This bug is back for me.