Mint 10 KDE locks up shortly after boot due to Nouveau video driver not turning video card fan on; no apparent way to install as a result

[R. David]

(Update 1, 2011.02.24 - just tried the final release, having the same exact problem as described below)

(Update 2, 2011.02.24 - problem appears to be caused by overheating video cards due to the FOSS nVidia driver not turning the card fans on; I can't see any way to install the system from an environment running the proprietary drivers...?)

(Update 3, 2011.02.25 - I listed my hardware wrong, accidentally specified two 8600GTS cards... actually two eVGA 9800GT cards)

Trying out Mint 10 KDE RC install, and everything goes very smoothly - KDE starts, welcome sound plays. But within 60 seconds the screen goes black and it locks up my system completely; no response from Num Lock key, no drive activity, no response to Ctrl+Alt+(F1-F12), no response to Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Even the reset button on my computer's case doesn't work - I have to hold the power button down and turn it on again.

I tried at least seven or eight times. After seeing another (possibly related) bug here, I tried adding "xforcevesa" and "nvidia.modset=0" to my kernel parameters, both on the normal boot and the "compatibility mode" option and it didn't work; I got a screen telling me that my video hardware couldn't be detected... at some point after clicking through some options I told it to restart X and then it logged into KDE, and proceeded to black-screen and lock up with 60 seconds.

I started a terminal and ran dmesg but didn't see anything unusual. By the time I can either get a drive mounted or get my networking going to try and copy the output it's already frozen.

I did verify the DVD integrity, it's in good shape.

I've been using Mint 8 KDE with well-working desktop effects for nearly a year and am using it now, and it's never done anything like this - I'm used to 60-day+ uptimes as a power-user. :-)

I have an Intel Core2Quad system that's a few years old (Intel Q6600 CPU), a Gigabyte GA-N650-SLI-DS4 motherboard, dual eVGA/nVidia GeForce 9800GT 1GB graphics cards, 6GB of RAM, and a D-Link DWL-G520 WiFi adapter (802.11A/B/G).

I'm going to continue trying to gather information, including trying to grab a dmesg dump, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to. I'd also like to try pulling a few pieces of hardware to see if it has any effect, including one video card and the WiFi card. If I find anything else out I'll post an update, but if anyone has any advice and/or information about this I'd really appreciate it.

[mockturtl (mockturtl)]

FWIW: I was seeing this in VirtualBox; allocating 1024 MB memory / 64MB video memory / 8GB hdd made it go away. Compare Maverick-KDE?

[R. David (gameforge1)]

Thanks for the good info mockturtl, perhaps I'll try recreating the problem in VB myself.

I just tried the new KDE release and got the same results. Reading through my previous report I figure I should add that I'm using the 64-bit image; my current Mint 8 install is 64-bit as well and I'd like to continue with 64-bit. And one tiny note about my hardware is that I'm using two monitors in addition to dual cards. Normally Linux live discs start the display in mirrored mode (same picture on both screens) and that's happening with Mint 10 too; seems to work as expected.

I'm downloading the Kubuntu 10.10/64-bit DVD now; I'll attempt to install that and see if it works.

[R. David (gameforge1)]

An update on this - I tried installing Kubuntu 10.10 and the same problem occurred, and in fact I noticed something... when I boot my old Mint 8 install, which is using proprietary nVidia drivers, the fans on my video cards spin up to a high RPM within a minute of booting. This never happens on the Maverick/KDE live disc or the Mint 10 live disc.

So it seems I need to figure out a way to install the system from an environment that's not using the FOSS nVidia driver, but instead the proprietary nVidia driver.

[R. David (gameforge1)]

I tried pulling one graphics card and got the other one to stay cool long enough to install the system with the help of cold weather and a fan. After installing the proprietary nVidia drivers, my card fans worked properly. I don't know if it's related but one card's fan stopped working during this incident (started making a lot of noise). It was the card that I pulled out, not the card that I had in the system when I installed; I will need to send the other one in for RMA/warranty from eVGA. The system is working and stable with just the one card at the moment; it would work with the other one if the fan weren't making noise. So at great effort and the cost of shipping a card I have worked around this bug.

I read that the Nouveau driver doesn't manage fan RPM and thus is supposed to run the fan at 100% all the time, and it most certainly didn't in my case - no video card fans could be heard with either one or two cards installed while using the Nouveau graphics driver.

Whether this is a bug with Nouveau, the Linux kernel, Ubuntu or some other project, I felt that Linux Mint greatly constrained my options in this case by A) not offering a text-based installation process and/or B) not offering the option to start the kernel and X server with all of the available video drivers, including Nouveau or the proprietary drivers.

While this bug was present when I tried Kubuntu as well, Kubuntu offers a text-based installation and thus the bug wouldn't have backed me into a corner if I had never managed to make it through the install. As it is it took me two weeks to figure out the source of this problem. I've been using Mint since version 7; the fact that Mint 10 seems to be essentially off-limits to nVidia card owners if the Nouveau drivers don't work for them is a little unsettling.

I'd also like to add that, for the sake of troubleshooting such drivers, support for runlevels S and/or 1 in the live CD kernel's parameters and /etc/rc.x tree would be greatly appreciated.

[Ikey Doherty (ikey)]

Reported upstream to nouveau

[jplien (jolien)]

Same behavior here with LMDE liveDVD. Tried both 201012 and 201108RC DVDs. Also tried booting into compatibility mode, which made text unreadable but still dropped video and locked the system after a relatively short time. I also have an nVidia card, so although I didn't hear the fans spinning up, it's probably the same issue. I guess I'll be installing regular Debian instead.