NetBSD and old nvidia laptop card / crash and unusable X11

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

Hi All,

I have a fine and nice laptop which unfortunately has an older nvidia 
card. I updated to 9.3, but the same issue persist as older versions.

lspci identifies the card as:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G72M [Quadro NVS 
110M/GeForce Go 7300] (rev a1)


If I boot, it will crash the kernel during boot, also in the installer 
kernel, so it is quite inconvenient.
If I disable nouveau (boot with -c) then the system comes up.

The only X11 driver usable at this point is the NV one. Small extract of 
Xorg.log at the bottom, it matches lspci.


Which we all know "sucks". It comes up and xterm works.
glgxgears works! It ranges 100-1300 frames (very inconsistent)

But most application are unusable due to refresh and redraw issues.
Firefox comes up, but is extremely slow in redrawing, you literally see 
the menus, tabs drawing their controls. Youtube video is pathetic.
Using gvim gtk is interesting, it come sup, but as soon as you scroll, 
most of the text disappears, like it is being redrawn by "drawing" 
without antialias in white over the old text, so it ghosts. GIMP leaves 
large black areas when clicking on controls, but mostly works.

GNUstep apps then are almost unusable as gvim-gtk, scrolling areas 
leaves with text halos of the previous of the previous one..

IN the short-term, has somebody an idea on how to tweak the driver 
prefs, perhaps some acceleration is misbehaving?

In the longer term, I hope the issues can be fixed the old X11 driver 
is, if I remember correctly, close to unmaintainable being just 
open-sourced proprietary code very hard to read.

Xorg.log is spammed with entries like these:

[  2003.211] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.212] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.212] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareCopy 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareCopy 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.237] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.238] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.238] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.238] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp
[  2003.238] (EE) NvPrepareSolid 8 bpp

Maybe



The best options would be to fix nouveau.

The Go 7300 according to 
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-go-7300.c1579 should have 
a G72 Curie processor,.

It should be here:
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html#NV40
a NV46, alias for G72.

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html
It should be quite well supported.

First would be not having crash with the console framebuffer :)
How to debug further? Drivers are in the kernel right?
A tedious option would be to somehow test linux, maybe with a LiveCD or 
with another hard disk.

Riccardo


[  1540.510] (--) NV: Found NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 at 01@01:00:0
[  1540.510] (WW) VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card 
support
[  1540.510] (II) Loading sub module "int10"
[  1540.510] (II) LoadModule: "int10"
[  1540.511] (II) Loading /usr/X11R7/lib/modules/libint10.so
[  1540.532] (II) Module int10: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[  1540.532]    compiled for 1.20.5, module version = 1.0.0
[  1540.532]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 24.0
[  1540.532] (II) NV(0): Initializing int10
[  1540.533] (II) NV(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000
[  1540.533] (--) NV(0): Chipset: "GeForce Go 7300"
[  1540.533] (==) NV(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
[  1540.533] (==) NV(0): RGB weight 888
[  1540.533] (==) NV(0): Default visual is TrueColor
[  1540.533] (II) Loading sub module "vgahw"
[  1540.533] (II) LoadModule: "vgahw"
[  1540.535] (II) Loading /usr/X11R7/lib/modules/libvgahw.so
[  1540.536] (II) Module vgahw: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[  1540.536]    compiled for 1.20.5, module version = 0.1.0
[  1540.536]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 24.0
[  1540.536] (==) NV(0): Using HW cursor
[  1540.536] (--) NV(0): Linear framebuffer at 0xC0000000
[  1540.536] (--) NV(0): MMIO registers at 0xDD000000
[  1540.542] (II) Loading sub module "i2c"

<..>
[  1540.684] (II) Module "ramdac" already built-in
[  1540.988] (II) EXA(0): Offscreen pixmap area of 128443904 bytes
[  1540.988] (II) EXA(0): Driver registered support for the following 
operations:
[  1540.988] (II)         Solid
[  1540.988] (II)         Copy
[  1540.988] (II)         UploadToScreen
[  1540.988] (II)         DownloadFromScreen
[  1540.988] (==) NV(0): Backing store enabled
[  1540.988] (==) NV(0): Silken mouse enabled
[  1541.019] (==) NV(0): DPMS enabled