nouveau driver frequently freezing / crashing kernel on fresh 20.04 install

[James Cuzella]

Hello,

I'm experiencing frequent crashes that hard-lock the system and kernel completely.

Symptoms are:
- Frozen screen
- No Keyboard or Mouse input accepted
- Remote SSH times out as if system is not responding
- Kernel does not respond to the "Alt + SysRq + REISUB" key sequence to force a reboot. (kernel was compiled with CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ=y)

I tracked down the issue to the nouveau driver (see attached journalctl logs for crash dump)

The primary and only PCI Video card in the system is quite old and thus should be well supported:

- 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT215 [GeForce GT 240] (rev a2)

lshw output:

$ sudo lshw -class display
  *-display
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: GT215 [GeForce GT 240]
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: a2
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0
       resources: irq:166 memory:ee000000-eeffffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:e0000000-e1ffffff ioport:e000(size=128) memory:c0000-dffff