I've got a box which I recently updated to F15. Everything about it
seemed rock solid perfect back on RHEL4, RHEL5, and RHEL6. This is a
pre-release OEM box which I can't update BIOS because they dropped
support for the motherboard so if you want a way out, blame BIOS.
After I installed F15 with gnome-shell it's the first time this box has
ever done anything even slightly graphics related. On the latest distro
kernels: 2.6.39-0.rc7.git6.1.fc16.x86_64 it doesn't seem to be
completely crashing like my -38 based kernels, but it doesn't work
smoothly. I get pauses sometimes when the box does some sort of
graphicsy/3Dy operation. The pause on the screen (mouse still works
just fine) lasts anywhere from 1-15 seconds. The pause always seems to
be accompanied with one or more (usually more) message like:
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: vm flush timeout: 0x00000022
At this point at least the .39 kernel doesn't seem to be completely
killing it, but it's hardly useable...
With a .38 kernel (kernel-2.6.38.6-26.rc1.fc15.x86_64) I originally had
different problems with 2 different (both nvidia cards) talking about
DMAR problem (In every case the visible result was that the screen just
hung indefinitely when doing some spiffy animation). I tried
intel_iommu={on,off} and eventually disabled VT-d in BIOS. That seems
to have shut up the dmar messages and gave me new interesting message
when the graphics hung like so:
[random snippet]
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ERROR nsource: DMA_VTX_PROTECTION nstatus: PROTECTION_FAULT
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ch 7 (0x001e7010) subc 7 class 0x4097 mthd 0x1dac data 0x00000000
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ERROR nsource: DMA_VTX_PROTECTION nstatus: PROTECTION_FAULT
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ch 7 (0x001e7010) subc 7 class 0x4097 mthd 0x1fd8 data 0x00000001
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ERROR nsource: DMA_VTX_PROTECTION nstatus: PROTECTION_FAULT
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ch 7 (0x001e7010) subc 7 class 0x4097 mthd 0x1fd8 data 0x00000001
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ERROR nsource: DMA_VTX_PROTECTION nstatus: PROTECTION_FAULT
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ch 7 (0x001e7010) subc 7 class 0x4097 mthd 0x0a2c data 0x00000000
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ERROR nsource: DMA_VTX_PROTECTION nstatus: PROTECTION_FAULT
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: PGRAPH - ch 7 (0x001e7010) subc 7 class 0x4097 mthd 0x1fd8 data 0x00000002
[...]
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: fail pre-validate sync
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: validate vram_list
[drm] nouveau 0000:60:00.0: validate: -16
Is there something I can collect, do try, supply or generally be helpful
to figure out why I can't seem to get reasonable video here? I think I
have 3 nvidia cards here (probably all about the same age, but I haven't
the foggiest really) I can get error messages from, I'll try any kernel
or any suggestion people have....
thanks.
-Eric
-Eric