edid cannot be read on Sony VPCCW2S1E and nouveau fails

[Franck]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

Edid on this laptop cannot be read, and consequently nouveau driver will have a black screen.

get-edid: get-edid version 2.0.0
 Performing real mode VBE call
 Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f00 bx=0x0 cx=0x0
 Function supported
 Call successful

 VBE version 300
 VBE string at 0x11100 "NVIDIA"

VBE/DDC service about to be called
 Report DDC capabilities

 Performing real mode VBE call
 Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x0 cx=0x0
 Function supported
 Call successful

 Monitor and video card combination does not support DDC1 transfers
 Monitor and video card combination does not support DDC2 transfers
 0 seconds per 128 byte EDID block transfer
 Screen is not blanked during DDC transfer

Reading next EDID block

VBE/DDC service about to be called
 Read EDID

 Performing real mode VBE call
 Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x1 cx=0x0
 Function supported
 Call failed

The EDID data should not be trusted as the VBE call failed
Error: output block unchanged

Notice that NVidia proprietary driver also fails the same way, but it has a workaround with the custom edid option.

Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/etc/X11/SNY05FA.bin"

Nouveau driver does not seem to have such option.

[Franck (alci)]

The last comment in upstream bug report suggests that the latest upstram nouveau driver can handle this case of unreadable EDID.
Is there a way to test latest driver in Ubuntu 10.10 beta ?
Is there a change this get into Ubuntu 10.10 final release ?

[Franck (alci)]

I have tried the xorg-edgers ppa, where xserver-xorg-video-nouveau is slightly newer than that of Maverick (1:0.0.16+git20100827 vs git20100805), but it still fails. I guess the fix comes in the kernel level part of the driver, where nouveau git is using 2.6.36-rc3.
So I might have to wait for 11.04 to get any chance to see nouveau working on that laptop... Until then I guess I'll have to stick to NVidia proprietary blob :(

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

should be fixed in natty, reopen if not.

[Franck (alci)]

Trying latest (nightly build) natty, I now get this error :

[drm] nouveau Pointer to BIT loadval table invalid

So unless this is some other problem showing up, the fix does not seem to work here.

[Franck (alci)]

Latest upgrade (alpha3) did fix the issue (both the edid and the BIT loadval problems). Closing the bug.