The nouveau/mplayer binomy freezes my UI

[i92guboj]

Hello.

I know the title is vague, but I have no idea what happening here. And I don't know whether this kind of problem is something usual/you should expect when using nouveau (first time using it myself).

I know it's bound to nouveau, because mplayer is a well tested piece of software, and because no userland program can do this kind of nasty thing in linux unless your kernel and graphics stack allows it to.

The system doesn't seem to freeze. It responds to sysrq+u and sysrq+b, so I can umount and reboot in a mostly-nice way instead of having to unplug the current adaptor from my laptop. A couple of times however I took my time to do this and the system didn't even respond to sysrq, so it might be more complex than that.

Using mplayer seems to trigger it consistently. I have tried a couple of video files I have in my home folder. I have also tried using mplayer to play some youtube videos (via youtube-viewer) and either way the UI locks. The screen sometimes becomes black, but some others it just freezes and that's it.

Changing VT doesn't work (or at least, it doesn't visibly work). The HD however shows activity. I am going to try to ssh in, and see if I can find something about this. But in the while, if some nouveau user has some advice, please, do share it

I haven't reported it to the nouveau mailing list because first I want to know what's going on/iron it out a bit.

[i92guboj]

In case anyone stumps with this, it seems that nouveau VDPAU support for NV4x cards is a no-go. I don't really understand the technical reasons and I am not interested in that either. I will just like the bug so anyone that is interested can follow up.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80145

[i92guboj]

Oh, as a side note: for the concrete case of mplayer, with this card, the only output video that works reasonably well is "x11".

• xv doesn't work at all, it gives a silly error about cpu/fpu failing, which confused me at the beginning
  xvmc says that the stream is not compatible with that concrete driver (what that means is a mystery to me)
  opengl which is supposed to move load from the cpu to the gpu, caused the opposite effect, like 20% load in the second core and like 60%-ish in the first
  

The x11 driver however allows me to play regular videos with an average load which is around 10% on each core. Note superb. But looking at how it all performs I guess it's acceptable enough.

I really thought that by this time the thing would have improved somehow. But now I am the side of those who think that we will never catch up If I wasn't that strongly inclined not to use the nvidia proprietary blob I would be using, and I understand people who do. It's not only about gaming, or about desktop effects. I do neither of them. I only need my laptop to be able to play a small video stream without freezing...

Enough of a rant.