nvidia-driver crashes, how to debug?

[Iesos]

Hi,

I'm here to look for some advice and help.

I have a Dell L502X (XPS 15), with a optimus nvidia card, and running some 3D programs, the nvidia driver can crash.

I have been trying to debug this for some time now, and I'm _very_ sure it is not because of the optirun/bumblebee implementation, wine, or kernel configuration. (since the same crash exists also in windows.). What I need to fully determine is: Is this crash due to: Hardware failure, or a "feature" in both the linux and windows driver.
What I want help with is to determine which it is, and how to convince Dell or nVidia, that this is the case. So, here follows a description of my debugging efforts.

There are a bunch of things that seem to be happening during the crash. The first thing is that the nvidia driver spits out an error:

[eccerr0r]

If it also crashes in Windows, it's very likely it's a hardware issue.

HPET is a high precision event timer, it's generally something good unless your hardware doesn't work.

TimeStampCounter is an internal timer counter to the CPU, and when it's "unstable" it means software has detected it's not monotonically increasing and thus cannot be used to measure time.

The "falling off the bus" error was meant to be a serious but humorous error that the GPU seemed to have "disappeared" from the bus, and will no longer communicate. It could be due to it "disconnecting" for normal reasons but likely it's due to hardware issues.

Likely the stall was due to some bad software-hardware interaction. If the "GPU fell off the bus" sometimes bad software did not handle this "condition" properly and will hang the CPU, and the kernel detected this situation.

I'd probably first check the fan of the GPU and see if it's clean. Make sure it's not overheating.

If it's clean and not overheating I'd look into a RMA. And there's a reason why I like desktops over laptops, I can toss out the video card and get another one to test my assumptions... The closed source proprietary driver makes it that much harder to debug too, if you can use the OSS Nouveau driver, it could give more hints or even work properly because it uses a different method of accessing the hardware... but I suspect it won't work properly either.

I've found the Nvidia closed source driver very stable, and any issues with it tends to be hardware problems if it was not force-built with a kernel it was not meant to be linked with. I had two nvidia cards (a GeForce4 MX420 and a GeForce 8400GS), both worked perfectly until they were removed from their systems (one died due to fan failure, other I no longer needed after getting the onboard video working.)
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[MRJonnyH]

Hi, I just registered because I'm also looking for safe config settings for XPS l502x.

I have an AOC LCD upstairs, connecting via HDMI>DVI adaptor.

This exhibits problems
(screen goes blank except for a large, pixelated square....)
Sometimes it causes the OS to freeze (hard reset required),
sometimes it handles the exception more gracefully (system notification message ambiguously reports 'nvidia display driver service stopped/restarted' {sic}

We also have a HUGE Samsung HDMI tv. This one also has a bug, similar to above, except sometimes the OS freezes, then a hard reset is required, but there are no critical errors/warnings in event viewer.

So how to debug?

I have cpu-z (just downloaded gpu-z also).

Not really a gamer (except backgammon), just really want a bulletproof build.

Any suggestions welcome (I don't know how the above poster even got that level of detail... hence my registering and waffling....)

THANKS !

[Hu]