problems with X after upgrading xorg-server and nvidia-driver/nouveau

[Rick C. Petty]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 07:46:28AM -0500, Robert Noland wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-17 at 10:35 -0500, Rick C. Petty wrote:
> > 
> > ~~~  From dmesg.boot:  ~~~
> > 
> > drm0: <NVidia Display Adapter> on vgapci0
> > panic: resource_list_alloc: resource entry is busy
> > cpuid = 1
> > KDB: stack backtrace:
> > db_trace_self_wrapper(c0bb1b43,e876a7c4,c07f9ae9,c0bd34c8,1,...) at 0xc0499c26 = db_trace_self_wrapper+0x26
> > kdb_backtrace(c0bd34c8,1,c0bb16cd,e876a7d0,1,...) at 0xc08265b9 = kdb_backtrace+0x29
> > panic(c0bb16cd,1,0,c0cec438,0,...) at 0xc07f9ae9 = panic+0x119
> 
> This panic appears to be during irq resource allocation.  I'm not sure
> how this occurs.  I haven't seen this issue reported before.  Does this
> happen if you manually kldload nouveau.ko from the console, without
> starting X?

That was happening when I loaded the module manually, before starting X.  I
was able to get it working when I loaded it from loader.conf instead of
directly.  After that the reported problems went away; I can't seem to
reproduce this now.  Here are some other notes.

The first panic occured after I uninstalled nvidia-driver but didn't unload
nvidia.ko first.  That one made sense.  After a reboot, there was no nvidia
driver to load and yet the panic still happened.  After a couple more
reboots, I was able to kldload nouveau.ko from the console without having
to do it in the loader.conf.  Additionally, I played around with nouveau
and nvidia together..  You can kldload nvidia if nouveau is already loaded
but the reverse is not true.  Probably nouveau should behave better in
this case, or perhaps refuse to load if nvidia is loaded.  Regardless,
nvidia won't properly initialize because of resource allocation problems if
nouveau is present, which makes sense, but at least it doesn't panic.

Another thing I noticed when using nouveau is that sometimes X just crashes
for no apparent reason.  This happens more often when trying to use GL.  A
warm reboot seems to fix the problem for awhile and GL apps just work,
albeit very slowly (as is expected).  But every so often X crashes with no
reported error messages (either on the console or in Xorg.0.log).  However,
xf86-video-nouveau-0.0.10.20090728 was significantly more stable than
nvidia-driver-180.29 on xorg-server-1.6.1,1.

After being fed up (who can work when X crashes every 5-60 seconds?), I
decided to downgrade to xorg-server-1.5.3_7,1 and nvidia-driver-180.29.
This seems to work just fine, even using the latest libraries (X11, GL,
GLU, etc.) except that I had to downgrade to xf86-input-keyboard-1.2.2_1
and xf86-input-mouse-1.2.3_1.  No more SEGVs for me now.

Is there a procedure for diagnosing X crashes on FreeBSD?  I could try to
build everything with -g and inspect core files.  I was just hoping there
was a better way.

-- Rick C. Petty