GeForce - double crash with nouveau (boot and X11)

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

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