Hi all,, I got a used laptop and sadly it has a nvidia 7300 card Sadly because I know they are troublesome - they work(ed) well on linux and freebsd until they stopped providing a current binary legacy driver, then you can trash it, apparently. I read that nouveau supports it, so let's try! FreeBSD has no nouveau, so, let's try NetBSD!
CD-ROM in, boot crashes. I need to boot -c and disable nouveau. I install NetBSD and of course the next reboot, it will hang again, I disable nouveau (I have done screeshot with the backtrace) With nouveau in the kernel disabled, I do try X11. Does it make sense at all to ty the nouveau driver if it is disabled in the kernel? I don't know if it is needed for console only or for both console and X11. I get garbage on the screen and if I change console, I get a reboot! yay! And a rebot an empty Xorg file Fine, I try the trick of telnet into the box, start X "remote"... and run it. What I see at the end is: [ 464.423] (==) Not automatically adding GPU devices [ 464.423] (==) Max clients allowed: 256, resource mask: 0x1fffff [ 464.423] (**) FontPath set to: /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/misc/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/misc/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/, /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/ [ 464.423] (**) ModulePath set to "/usr/X11R7/lib/modules" [ 464.423] Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices. Configuration failed. [ 464.423] (EE) Server terminated with error (2). Closing log file. I notice that X went through all the drivers and that the driver list is doubled even (every driver appears twice). So I think nouveau has an issue. Now the next bet would be to try the old "nv" driver. I cobble together a quick xorg file, but I get garbage and it says that no GPUs are found and get a crash. I restart, disable loading of all modules and this time i get "garbage" on the screen, but if I move the mouse I see a square garbage moving! so something "is alive", no errors in Xorg.log except: [ 252.202] (EE) DMA drain timeout Any suggestions? I'd like to get nv working but even more nouveau of course (here I think some kernel and drm debugging is required) I am almost tempted to try out Linux to see if nouveau works on that card (it should work, per spec) and/or if nv works there as a "reference" against BSD, but it is of course extra effort and I need a second hard disk to poke with that maybe, while hopefully we debug NetBSD Riccardo