Bugzilla – Bug 1214029
KDE locks up
Last modified: 2023-08-26 12:35:56 UTC
Created attachment 868654 [details] hardware information report from YaST The graphics on my screen locks up. I can move the mouse pointer, but mouse clicks do nothing, and keyboard escapes like CTRL-SHIFT-F1 don't work. This happens in two situations:- 1) when starting up, after I type in my password, it displays a logo with a rotating gearwheel underneath it. After a while the gearwheel stops rotating and the system is locked. This happens most of the time, but not always, and I have found a workaround. If I type CTRL-SHIFT-F1 as soon as the rotating gearwheel appears, I get a virtual terminal. If I then wait about 20 seconds and then type CTRL-SHIFT-F7, the graphics screen comes back and it continues to boot normally (but quite slowly). This suggests to me that it may be a sequencing error causing a deadlock. If I delay the KDE startup by switching to a virtual terminal, it prevents the sequencing error. 2) After I have been working on my machine for some hours, the graphics locks up. Moving the mouse over a different window doesn't give it the focus, which it should as I use focus under mouse, and the clock on the task panel at the bottom of the screen freezes. Any window which should be updating freezes as well. I can log in to my machine from another device, so the whole OS isn't frozen, and killing the X server usually redisplays the login screen. In case (2), killing the application whose window currently has the focus sometimes (but not always) unlocks the graphics. I can tell which window has the focus because I use a different colour titlebar. I saw this problem with openSUSE Leap 15.3, but 15.5 seems to be a bit worse. I didn't try with 15.4 because I only ran it for long enough to upgrade to 15.5. The problem may be caused by the nouveau driver not working well with my NVIDIA graphics card. I can't use the NVIDIA driver because there isn't one. NVIDIA no longer support my relatively old graphics card with drivers for current Linux kernels. I'm not sure which version of the kernel lost support from NVIDIA for my graphics card. I normally use an external 28" 4K monitor, but I have seen the same problem when using the laptop's built-in 3200x1800 screen. I've attached a full hardware information report from YaST. If it will help the driver developers for me to test a patched nouveau driver, I can install it. I've ordered a new laptop, which I hope will fix the problem because I can use the NVIDIA driver, but I will be retaining my current one for some time. I'll update this bug report if the new laptop shows the same problem.
(In reply to Richard Parkins from comment #0) > > The problem may be caused by the nouveau driver not working well with my > NVIDIA graphics card. I can't use the NVIDIA driver because there isn't one. > NVIDIA no longer support my relatively old graphics card with drivers for > current Linux kernels. I'm not sure which version of the kernel lost support > from NVIDIA for my graphics card. > That sounds surprising. According to https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/X11:Drivers:Video/nvidia-gfxG04/pci_ids-390.157?expand=1, the K2100M GPU should be supported by the 390.157 driver. A package is available in the NVidia repo: https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/leap/15.5/x86_64/
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2001084#p2001084 also indicates the 470 series driver from the same repository also works.
(In reply to Christophe Marin from comment #2) > https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2001084#p2001084 also indicates > the 470 series driver from the same repository also works. Note: I doubt it does.
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers says Beware: Nvidia's site may declare shorter support period with the same chip for mobile graphics compared to desktop video cards. This is not true for Linux drivers Perhaps naïvely, I had assumed that the right place to look for NVIDIA drivers for Linux was the NVIDIA website, which told me that my graphics card has reached end of life and no drivers are available. Having followed the advice in the page above and installed the NVIDIA drivers, my machine started up without the workaround, although it did report two gfx resets. I checked with lsmod that it is now running the NVIDIA drivers. Since the startup problem that I reported was intermittent, a single successful startup does not convince me that it is fixed, and the lockup when running was also intermittent. I'll report in a few days on whether or not I'm still having problems with the graphics. In the meantime I've left this item in state NEEDSINFO from me.
Thanks for help from Christophe Marin Having installed the NVIDIA drivers, it hasn't locked up during boot since then, and I haven't seen a lock-up in use either. I think you can record this as fixed unless the nouveau driver developers want to look at it. I've bought a new laptop anyway, so once I've installed everything on it I would be able to test a patched nouveau driver on this one if that would be helpful in improving the nouveau driver. It might be a good idea to update the release notes, which currently say that the nouveau driver may have problems with some NVIDIA graphics cards, to also say explicitly where to find NVIDIA drivers, since the NVIDIA site misleadingly tells me there aren't any for my machine.
Indeed it's still supported by G04/390.157 drivers.But, yes. The driver is considered a legacy driver ...