15.09 UEFI install fails to boot with Nvidia (nouveau)

[FRidh]

I just did a new UEFI installation of 15.09 on my desktop featuring an Nvidia graphics card. The installation succeeded however, when booting the system it got stuck. I guess it uses the nouveau driver by default. I solved it by using the proprietary nvidia driver

services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ nvidia ];

and of course enabling the non-free packages

nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;

Anyway, I thought it be good to add this here in case others get stuck with the same issue.

[vcunat]

The installer itself boots fine, right?

Nouveau might be chosen as the default by X, but it doesn't work everywhere IIRC. On Maxwell cards, "modesetting" driver seems preferred. /var/log/X.0.log.old should show more details (unless you restarted X multiple times since then).

[vcunat]

Actually, our default videoDrivers is [ "ati" "cirrus" "intel" "vesa" "vmware" "modesetting" ], so likely no nouveau would be tried.

[wkennington]

Afaik that doesn't prevent the kernel from loading the nouveau module and
breaking on newer cards when trying to modeset for the kernel terminal
buffer.

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 15:10 Vladimír Čunát notifications@github.com wrote:

Actually, our default videoDrivers is [ "ati" "cirrus" "intel" "vesa"
"vmware" "modesetting" ], so likely no nouveau would be tried.

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#9893 (comment).

[vcunat]

No, but I don't see how else would X find the nouveau module; perhaps we should provide it to better handle X on nvidia without specifying videoDrivers.

That is likely completely separate thing from console breaking due to KMS (which is what the report looks like).

[wkennington]

Well, he says it got stuck booting the system but doesn't say where. My
guess is that it is the same issue with the kernel driver putting nouveau
in an unusable state for the iso when used with new cards. The reason
everything is fine when you enable the proprietary driver is because it
blacklists the kernel modules which cause it to normally fail. It may not
actually be an issue of xorg, but a side effect of enabling the proprietary
driver there.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/hardware/video/nvidia.nix

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 15:52 Vladimír Čunát notifications@github.com wrote:

No, but I don't see how else would X find the nouveau module; perhaps we
should provide it to better handle X on nvidia without specifying
videoDrivers.

This is likely completely separate thing from console breaking due to KMS
(which is what the report looks like).

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#9893 (comment).

[vcunat]

Yes, those were my thoughts as well.

[FRidh]

The installer booted indeed just fine.

I was using a configuration.nix generated by nixos-generate_config and did not modify it. Therefore, if I am correct, it shouldn't even have installed X at that point. It seems plausible that indeed some other kernel module is blacklisted in the case of the proprietary driver.

Tonight I'll boot into the old configuration and have a look afterwards at the logs.

[FRidh]

It was indeed a nouveau issue.

Sep 17 18:56:49 nixos kernel: nouveau E[  DEVICE][0000:01:00.0] unknown chipset, 0x124020a1
Sep 17 18:56:49 nixos kernel: nouveau E[     DRM] failed to create 0x00000080, -22
Sep 17 18:56:49 nixos kernel: nouveau: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -22

I have a GTX 970 'Maxwell' which isn't supported until Linux 3.19 whereas I'm running 3.18.21.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg4NTg

[FRidh]

@vcunat the order you refer to is the one specified in here, right?
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/services/x11/xserver.nix

But I hadn't enabled X yet, and therefore that expression isn't taken into account. I believe that because of that, nouveau is still loaded automatically on machines which haven't enabled xserver.
I had X still disabled,

[vcunat]

I was listing stuff around X modules, but your "nouveau" is the kernel module which is useful without X as well (high-resolution console mainly, I suppose).

[ttuegel]

Please open an issue for 16.03 if this persists.