Natty Alpha3: Nvidia GeForce8400 + i915 = Crash on Boot

[mungewell]

Thinkcenter (8171-21U) + GeoForce8400 PCI-E crashes on boot; screen blank, keyboard non response (Caps lock does not light/de-light) and processor fan increases in speed. Removing GFX card from system allows it to boot into Natty with on-board GFX.

Same behaviour on 2.6.38 kernel (self built or from Kernel team) installed on top of 10.04. 2.6.37rcX runs OK.

Note: GFX is installed in 1x slot which may be a contributing factor.

WORKAROUND: Kernel boot option 'i915.blacklist=true' disables the i915 driver and allows liveCD to boot.

[mungewell (simon-mungewell)]

booting with 'quiet' removed from 11.04 options, last thing seen is
--
[drm] initialized overlay support
--

[mungewell (simon-mungewell)]

Figured out that it is the internal GFX (intel i915) interacting with the PCI-E (Nouveau). I can prevent this happening on the installed system (10.04 + 2.6.38) but killing/renaming the i915 module. At which point it boots through to X.
--
$ cd /lib/modules/2.6.38-020638rc8-generic/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/
$ sudo mv i915.ko i915.ko_hide
--

Not sure how to achieve the same with a LiveCD. Suggestions?

I am unable to disable the onboard GFX in the BIOS,
Simon.

[mungewell (simon-mungewell)]

Kernel boot option 'i915.blacklist=true' disables the i915 driver and allows liveCD to boot.

[mungewell (simon-mungewell)]

Bug report on Kernel Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32072

Simon

[penalvch (penalvch)]

mungewell, thank you for reporting this bug and helping make Ubuntu better. This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please report the results following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingKernelBoot ? As well, can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

[Marcin Slusarz (marcin-slusarz)]

Quite possibly it was fixed in 2.6.38.5 by "drm/nouveau: fix notifier memory corruption bug" (bug was introduced in 2.6.38-rc8)

[mungewell (simon-mungewell)]

This is still an issue with 12.10. If you want a specific log, please advise and I'll try to get it...

[mungewell (simon-mungewell)]

Confirmed as still a problem with Quantal (Ubuntu Studio Beta2)

[mungewell (simon-mungewell)]

opps... meant to say 'Raring Ringtail' (13.04).