switching from nvidia to nouveau solely!??

jhon987 · Guru Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 301

Hi,
my gentoo was built with nvidia drivers for graphics (and uvesa as frambuffer) originally, now because of some issues with nvidia causing jittering and freezes while typing I like to try nouveau and delete nvidia, problem is:
it seems xorg keeps trying to load nvidia even though I've deleted the drivers, switched to VIDEO_CARDS="nouveau" and emerged -auND world...

how can I make xorg to load nuoveau instead?

P.S. my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d file is empty, and I like to keep it that way if possible...

Chiitoo · Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2014 1:21 pm Post subject: ><)))°€

Teegrins, jhon987!

To use nvidia-drivers, I believe it's still necessary to use at least a minimal xorg.conf (device section) to tell X to use nvidia. Perhaps you have one such file? You mention xorg.conf.d but what about plain /etc/X11/xorg.conf of old?

One can also (usually) examine the /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see from there if a configuration file is being used, and which file exactly. Likewise, it will provide lots of tell about what exactly is being used (or/and tried).

One may also post the contents of said file(s) here for others to take a look-see. :)
_________________
Kindest of regardses.

jhon987 · Guru Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 301

Chiitoo · Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2014 3:59 pm Post subject: Re: ><)))°€

jhon987 · Guru Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 301

phewww, those were intensive (about) 30 hours of trial and errors! unfortunately the links you referenced me to did not helped much @Chiitoo, but I appreciate your help. posting here what I've learned, hopefully someone else might find that info useful..

1. starting with the non-stop usb output inside console, researching this thoroughly, it turns out this happens because of some usb devices capability for auto-suspend - in my case those are the (Microsoft's) keyboard and mouse, which Gentoo has wiki page that explains how to enable powersaving (in my case it was disabled): http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/USB_Power_Saving. following these wiki halfway through (without setting udev rule) didn't helped either and the only workaround I've found after reading countless of forums threads is to start gpm e.g. systemctl start gpm, that process has effectively stopped the continuous output spitting (which almost drove me nuts as I'm trying to solve other issues).

2. about nouveau, I got so frustrated - I don't even wanna talk about it, aside from rebuilding my whole gentoo from scratch there's almost nothing I haven't tried, compiling it as a module (opposed to built-in as the Gentoo nouveau wiki suggests), re-emerging xorg-drivers and server, removing anything that might be connected to nvidia drivers, booting with nouveau.modset=1 / 0 nothing worked, essentially I had similar issue to this guy: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-956304.html and my xorg log was looking the same, ending with the "(EE) [drm] KMS not enabled" " (EE) No devices detected " "no screens found". I even tried unmasking nouveau-drm and using that as well but I coudn't pass compiling errors even though I managed to fix some on my own. eventually I decided to head back to nvidia which also proved to be nothing close to 'a walk in the park'...

3. going back to nvidia I had to enable some feature the gentoo nvidia wiki doesn't mention - I had to go inside Loadable module support ---> [*] Enable loadable module support and there to enable module unload option, that took a little bit of effort to figure. but that's not all, after doing so (and of course re-compiling my kernel for the gazillion'th time) there was another issue -> apparently evdev module got somehow wiped out from my system - surely not manually by me - what I had was, the system seemed to boot just fine until it reaches gdm, then no mouse no keyboard only hard reset works. at last, through recovery mode and Ubuntu live cd as a rescue disk I was able to access xorg log and there I found out about evdev missing - in order to solve that you need to recompile x11-drivers/xf86-input-evdev.

On top of all that, I'd like to add that the availability of Gentoo forums during this micro-crisis was absolutely staggering, almost every-time I tried to enter the forums, there was a server overload which prevented me from probably retrieving some crucial information.

had I known from the beginning that switching to nouveau drivers would be such a disaster I'd probably wouldn't even bother with it in the first place... then again, maybe I'd still would.. just for the hack of it...