sebt

openSUSE 11.1 on Lenovo T61 - nvidia logout issues updated

Tuesday, 23. December 2008, 18:08:53

lenovo, t61, linux, opensuse 11.1, nvidia

Updated! Jan 29th 2009

Friends and colleagues know that I like Linux and I increasingly dislike Windows and the general direction of Microsoft. So I'm usually on a mission to get everything working nicely between my favourite distro(s) and my hardware. Recently I've settled upon openSUSE it has the right combination of power features, configurability and bleeding edge features. I have also experience with Fedora, Ubuntu and Slackware, but openSUSE has everything covered for my general computing needs.

Having installed and run openSuse 11.0 for a few months on a Lenovo T61, I was fairly eager to get openSuse 11.1 up and running with many of the new features it promises. This has gone smoothly with the exception of one issue as yet unresolved. Read on for the details.

Ok, first the machine spec. Lenovo laptops come in many flavours, and the generic name (eg. T61, R61) says little about the machine beyond it's form factor and the 'product range' to which it belongs.

Lenovo T61 6460
Intel Core2 Duo 2.4Ghz (T8xxx), centrino vpro
nVidia Quadro NVS 140
15.4" 1680x1050 screen
2G DDR2 RAM
160G Hard disk (WD)
Intel 4965 (AGBN) wireless module

Before talking about opensuse 11.1, a word about 11.0, the original installation of which was fairly straightforward. Only the graphics and wireless presented issues; for the graphics, the installer selected the "nv" open source driver, which worked and detected the correct resolution, but failed to support any 3D or operate at 24bpp - at least, that was the effect, since all the opensuse branding graphics had a pixellated, lacking-in-colour-depth, effect. Fixing the graphics involved installing the proprietary nvidia driver using the nvidia community repository (a breeze to set up in opensuse) which installed the 173.xx version of the driver. Apart from some performance issues with 3D effects in KDE 4, it worked fine.

Before attempting a fresh install, I thought I would upgrade the existing 11.0, a process that went fairly smoothly. In 11.0 I had installed only KDE 3.5, preferring to wait a few more months before installing KDE 4, since the 4.0 release was a little too unstable for general use. The upgrade went well, barring the fact that I lost my nvidia graphics driver (expected due to the kernel upgrade). However unlike the previous version, 11.1 had selected the "MESA" driver as the default, providing a (very non-wide) resolution of 1024x768 with obviously low colour depth. A quick edit of xorg.conf allowerd me to switch this to the Xorg "nv" driver, which ran the panel at the correct resolution, but still lacking 24-bit colour. Everything else had been correctly detected and upgraded during the install process.

Adding the 11.1 community NVidia repository, I installed the 177.82 Nvidia driver and rebooted. After the Nvidia logo screen appeared (a tell that the driver is going to work!) the logon screen popped up in all its 24-bit glory. So I decided I'd have a look at the new KDE 4.1.3, switching from my default KDE 3.5 before logging in. I had the pleasant surprise that compositing was enabled by default although after a short period of use I was unhappy with the responsiveness of KDE 4 with compositing. The transitions were jerky and introduced delays into my workflow. A bit of googling revealed that these issues were probably nvidia driver related, so I made a note to revisit this issue.

I decided to switch my desktop back to the more familiar KDE 3.5 environment, so I hit logout. Normally this causes a restart of X and the reappearance of the logon screen. Unfortunately, I was met with a text mode screen with a (non-flashing) cursor at the top left. The usual hotkeys for switching consoles did not work, nor did CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE (kill X) so I was stuck. The hard drive appeared to be doing things, so blindly I hit CTRL+ALT+F1 and issued a 'find' command from the root. The hard drive went crazy, so everything was working except the display. Puzzled, I rebooted (CTRL+ALT+DEL seemed to work as well), switched back to the "nv" driver temporarily just to check that it would not exhibit the same behaviour upon logout. It didn't, so it seemed that the problem was related in some way to the nvidia driver, or a weirdy with the upgrade (11.0->11.1) process. Not having much to lose, it was time for a fresh reinstallation of 11.1.

So in the hope of these issues going away I reformatted my linux partitions and installed 11.1 afresh. The installation went much the same way as the upgrade - smoothly, except for the MESA driver issue as described above. I pretty much had to repeat the post-installation steps as described above, installing the proprietary NVidia driver. Once complete, I repeated the "logout" procedure from KDE 4, and ran into the same issue again: blank screen, non-flashing cursor at top left, display unresponsive to anything except CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot.

Before I continue, I should point out that I have not yet solved this problem. I can say with about 80% certainty that it is related to NVidia and their proprietary driver. There is a small possibility that the problem could relate to one of the following also; the versions of the kernel and X.Org included with 11.1, or a hardware/firmware issue with my T61. On the plus side, everything else seems stable. So long as I don't log out of an X-session, causing the X-server to restart, everything appears to work properly, notwithstanding various little bugs that others have found with KDE and openSuse 11.1.

So what have I tried to fix this problem?

Every version of the NVidia proprietary driver that's been released since 177.82, all the way up to 180.27 (released Jan 26th 09). I would have liked to try prior versions, particularly the 173.xx that was working fine with 11.0, but it seems that these versions will not build against the newer kernel.
Commenting out everything in the "modules" section of xorg.conf (dri, glx etc.)
Various nvidia options in the kernel module configuration in /etc/modules.d/nvidia, mainly those suggested on various forum postings and at thinkwiki.

Links and other info:

Bug report #461262 has been filed at Novell's bug tracker. They seem to think that this issue is squarely an nvidia one; I'm not convinced.
The following thinkwiki pages are (or will be) useful for anyone else having issues with Lenovo T/R/X6x series machines running NVidia graphics: Thinkwiki NVidia Quadro NVS 140, Thinkwiki T61 page, Thinkwiki installing openSuse 11.1 on a T61.
openSuse forum link to a posting from another user reporting the same problem, confirming that I'm not the only one having this issue!
This blog posting from a fellow openSuse enthusiast/programmer documents the same issue. I'd have posted on there by now if his spam filter didn't keep rejecting me.. was it something I said?!

I'd welcome comments from anyone having this issue or with any related info.

Update Jan 12th - Workaround / Temporary fix

The following workaround, taken from the last link on the above list, provides a temporary workaround for the hanging problem:

Edit the file /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc (may differ for other distros) and find the “X-:*-Core” section (Core config for local displays). Change ServerAttempts to 5 and ServerTimeout to 45. This seems to cut down the wait to an acceptable level - although the underlying problem is still there - and stops X from perceptibly crashing altogether.

A problem new to the 180+ series of display drivers is garbage filling the screen before seeing the logon screen (kwin), and briefly after logon before the desktop appears. I'd welcome any comments or confirms on this issue.

Opera 10 goodness ("Peregrine")

Comments

Anonymous # 28. January 2009, 13:59

Anonymous writes:

Hi, i also have that Problem on T61 and openSuse 11.1 - although i am not sure wether its really the nvidia driver cause yesterday the issue happends while not rebooting/logout. Is your numlock blinking on hang? Best wishes, Maik!

sebt # 30. January 2009, 16:01

No blinking numlock, but the workaround described here minimises the timeout to an acceptable level, allowing logout and restart of X.

Are you running a T61 with nvidia, intel or ATI graphics?

If nvidia, when using the nvidia proprietary driver version 180+, do you see garbage on the screen intermittently during startup and login?

Seb

Anonymous # 31. January 2009, 11:50

Anonymous writes:

I am using nvidia graphics (nvs 140m) and yes i have that screen garbage on booting too. :) Wonder why you havent the blinkinging numlock, maybe i have another Problem? Thanks for the link, will have a lok on it. Grettings. :)

sebt # 1. February 2009, 05:26

Glad to help. In case you missed it on the above links, I updated my blogpost to reflect the workaround (right at the end of the posting). Good luck, and post back if you find any useful info, or workaround/fix for the intermittent garbage issue!

Seb

Anonymous # 10. February 2009, 18:20

Anonymous writes:

I just wanted to point out that this is most definitely an nvidia-proprietary-driver problem. Using the Nouveau and even the open 2D nv driver, the system does not hang at all on login.

sebt # 10. February 2009, 18:46

I have installed 11.1 on a few other systems with various nvidia graphics hardware and although I don't see the "hanging on logout" issue as with the T61, I see the same graphical buffer-glitches during startup and on login. Also I have seen the nvidia driver crash X on one of these systems in KDE 4.2, with graphical garbage on the screen and a hang, and only the Magic SysRq keys working to restart the system.

As you say, it seems that the nvidia driver 180+ series is pretty unstable at the moment. The strange thing is I only see the hang-on-logout on the T61 (Quadro NVS 140) and others have reported that the 180+ series driver on the T61 does not hang on logout in OpenSUSE 11.0. Puzzling.

I noticed 180.29 has appeared on the ftp. I'll give that a try later.

Seb

Anonymous # 15. February 2009, 16:15

dsent writes:

Confirming screen garbage :-(
openSUSE 11.1, KDE 4.2, nvidia 180.29

Anonymous # 15. February 2009, 16:41

dsent writes:

Seems that it's not an NVIDIA issue:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=464512
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19579

sebt # 15. February 2009, 17:09

Thanks for the heads up

The confusion comes from using the pre-180 series driver. For if you use older versions the screen garbage/glitches go away.

Seb